Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today Jerry Harrison, needs no introduction. You were
Speaker 1: just talking about having met before, and Jerry started talking
Speaker 1: about his problem with record companies. Jerry tell us the story.
Speaker 1: So I was producing a band called Pure that was
Speaker 1: from Vancouver and their manager was one of the organizers
Speaker 1: of Music West, which is where we met. And the
Speaker 1: band was called Pierre, and they had a song called Pierre,
Speaker 1: And so what did the record company put out as
Speaker 1: the first single? Blast? And then, of course record companies
Speaker 1: being record companies, Blast didn't do quite as well as
Speaker 1: they had hoped, so they spent by the time they
Speaker 1: got around to Pure. Pure came out in Canada, but
Speaker 1: never in the United States. It's like, you have a
Speaker 1: song and a band with the same name. Don't you
Speaker 1: think that that's a great advertising technique. Let's, you know,
Speaker 1: put the money behind that. Everybody will know the song
Speaker 1: and they'll know the name of the band. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's sort of like horses and water. So what has
Speaker 1: been your experience in your lengthy career with record companies.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they're very very astute and very good, and but
Speaker 1: many times they outthink themselves and they they never want
Speaker 1: to spend money in advance, and so therefore they missed
Speaker 1: gigantic copper opportunities. And the one time that I overcame
Speaker 1: that was when when Tony has recorded Little Creatures. Ah,
Speaker 1: David had been making our videos, so he had he
Speaker 1: had were with Tony Basil on once in a lifetime.
Speaker 1: She had done cross on him painless. And then he
Speaker 1: worked with Julia something I can't remember her last name
Speaker 1: on bringing down the House. So I went to Gary
Speaker 1: kirkerstar manager, and I said, we need we're a band,
Speaker 1: we need all be involved in making videos. We want
Speaker 1: to make four videos for Little Creatures. He goes, well,
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers never go for that, and I said, well,
Speaker 1: then tell him we're not turning in the album. And
Speaker 1: so we went to Warner Brothers and he said what
Speaker 1: I said, and he said, I got you three. So
Speaker 1: we all did storyboards for the various songs that they
Speaker 1: thought should be videos, and the first video, strangely really
Speaker 1: to me, was the Lady Don't Mind, and it was
Speaker 1: a mixture of something that Tina had come up with
Speaker 1: and what I came up with. And Uh, I was
Speaker 1: good friends with Jim jarme As who made Stranger Than
Speaker 1: para Ice and brought him on as basically the director,
Speaker 1: but who I kind of co directed it with Uh.
Speaker 1: Chris and Tina did with Teddy baff for Lucas Stay
Speaker 1: Up Late, and then David did with Steven Johnson Road
Speaker 1: to Nowhere. Then Warner Brothers decided that and She Was
Speaker 1: would be the first single, so they hired Jim Blashfield
Speaker 1: to do a He was sort of did a kind
Speaker 1: of cartoon version for for videos. So in the end
Speaker 1: we walked in When the album was released with four videos,
Speaker 1: we also got like small budgets like forty dollars apiece.
Speaker 1: But because we were conversant with how do you make
Speaker 1: videos friends with people in that industry, we could do it.
Speaker 1: That album was our biggest selling record. And the reason
Speaker 1: it was a bigger biggest selling record is that MTV
Speaker 1: always had a video ready to go when the when
Speaker 1: the one that was sort of running out of steam,
Speaker 1: there was another one to go and it you know,
Speaker 1: and I tried to tell this too when I was
Speaker 1: producing the violent films. It's like you have this song
Speaker 1: old Mother Reagan, it lasts for one minute. Go to
Speaker 1: the U c L A U c L A film
Speaker 1: class and say you're gonna give ten thousand dollars and
Speaker 1: you want every student to make a version of old
Speaker 1: Mother Reagan. Men picked the top four and play him
Speaker 1: in a row. But they don't do it. You know,
Speaker 1: I had uh. I was producing uh big hitan the Monsters,
Speaker 1: and I got John Lee Hooker to be on Boom
Speaker 1: Boom Boom. This is amazing version. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've heard it. It's a theme of a TV show
Speaker 1: which I can't recall. Right. The second so I knew
Speaker 1: John Lee Hooker's manager. He was from Milwaukee as I am,
Speaker 1: and I said would he be in a video? And
Speaker 1: he goes, yeah, I gotta pay him, but sure. So
Speaker 1: I went to Giant Records, which was earning Ace Offs Wreck,
Speaker 1: and he goes, well, we're putting our money into this
Speaker 1: other single maybe in a few months. Well, John Lee
Speaker 1: died a month later, so we would have been the first.
Speaker 1: We would have been the last recording of John Lee Hooker.
Speaker 1: MTV would have played at NonStop. But you know there,
Speaker 1: you know, not thinking ahead. They they missed the vote
Speaker 1: and missed and missed making a lot of money. If
Speaker 1: you ask me. Okay, at this late date, because you
Speaker 1: were in graduate school when you all to be joined
Speaker 1: talking heads, you feel confident in all your decisions. Would
Speaker 1: you like to replay any of this? You can't, but
Speaker 1: if you could, I think I would have been a
Speaker 1: great architect. But I'm very happy with the decisions I've made.
Speaker 1: So let's go back to that. How did you meet
Speaker 1: Jonathan Richmond? He came in my apartment with There was
Speaker 1: a contingent of Andy Warhol superstars that lived in Cambridge.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you ever read the book about
Speaker 1: Edie Sedgwick. Yeah I read it. Yeah, so she was
Speaker 1: there just a little bit before that. But there was
Speaker 1: this guy, ed Hood may Rickard was around. I think
Speaker 1: that actually Andy Paley was part of that. So I
Speaker 1: came in with Jonathan and baha, stop for a second.
Speaker 1: How did you know all these people? Uh? I was
Speaker 1: just part of being in a scene in Cambridge. Okay,
Speaker 1: well let's just start there. So you go to Harvard undergrad.
Speaker 1: I mean some people sit in their dorm room and study.
Speaker 1: Other people barely go to school. So you move from
Speaker 1: Milwaukee to Harvard. Do you immediately say, and this is
Speaker 1: a very you know tumultuous and also positive time. Do
Speaker 1: you merely integrate yourself in the culture pretty much? And
Speaker 1: I played in a band and one of the guys
Speaker 1: who I played in a band with had been in
Speaker 1: prep school at Putney with Andy Paley, and Andy, who
Speaker 1: was hanging around in New York, had gotten to know
Speaker 1: Danny Fields and various people in a sort of warhole
Speaker 1: expanded group. So when he came up to Cambridge, I
Speaker 1: think he probably introduced us first to some of these people.
Speaker 1: But we can't we fit in so and so we
Speaker 1: would see them. And then Jonathan came in and he
Speaker 1: was raving about the Velvet Underground album Loaded, and I
Speaker 1: was making a film about alienation, and I went, Jonathan
Speaker 1: seems to take energy and excitement from the things that
Speaker 1: I think are alienating other people, which is sort of oh,
Speaker 1: you know, over corportization of society and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So the film had two thirds two people that were
Speaker 1: sort of overwhelmed by what were the changes of society
Speaker 1: and Jonathan, who was embracing it. So I filmed Jonathan
Speaker 1: like driving along Route nine out in Native and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, pointing out all the road signs. He loved
Speaker 1: the new ones he hated and things like that. He's
Speaker 1: generally the Jonathan Richmond philosophy. I recorded a concert of
Speaker 1: him playing, and I was using that as the background
Speaker 1: music for the movie. My roommate was Ernie Brooks, and
Speaker 1: he kept coming and goes like, you know, this music
Speaker 1: is sort of amazing. It just sort of can't get
Speaker 1: it out of my head. Meanwhile, Jonathan saw kindred spirits
Speaker 1: and he started hanging around all the time. And so
Speaker 1: actually Ernie and I dropped out of Harvard second semester
Speaker 1: senior year to join the Modern Lovers. Okay, slower at
Speaker 1: one point, let's go back to the Alienation movie. One
Speaker 1: of the big differences between popular music today and the
Speaker 1: area you're talking about was alienation was a core element. Yes,
Speaker 1: now you seem very rooted. Are you someone who feels alienated? No, No,
Speaker 1: I feel I've I don't feel alienated, but I feel
Speaker 1: that sometimes my pherosophy what I believe about life at
Speaker 1: some of the new uh let's say, philosophical theories I'm
Speaker 1: pretty much a disagreement with. But I that's I disagree.
Speaker 1: I'm not alienated. Well, let's talk about the type you
Speaker 1: because as we get older, we are more comfortable in
Speaker 1: our shoes and fit in and you know, and you've
Speaker 1: built a career. But back then we use someone who
Speaker 1: was you know, well he anti this and he antie that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. I had been in a in a band
Speaker 1: in high school and then I've been an abandoned college.
Speaker 1: But I never thought I was going to be a
Speaker 1: professional musician. For a long time, I thought I was
Speaker 1: gonna be a scientist, and then I was. I was
Speaker 1: actually a painter for a while, and a sculptor and
Speaker 1: a filmmaker and then but I always thought that architecture
Speaker 1: might be where I was going to end up. And
Speaker 1: I used to build things all the time, and I
Speaker 1: thought that I have a mathematical sense. I thought it
Speaker 1: might be a good balance between what I had. However,
Speaker 1: I felt in this in the sixties, in particular, that
Speaker 1: music determined the culture, and that I felt that like
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan and the Beatles were more important than John
Speaker 1: Kennedy as far as determining what people thought. So the
Speaker 1: idea of ending up being a musician to me was
Speaker 1: almost the highest thing to aspire to. I just didn't
Speaker 1: think that I had the training as a musician to
Speaker 1: be that. But when I met Jonathan and started and
Speaker 1: then I went, Jonathan is playing something unlike anybody else
Speaker 1: in the world, and this deserves to be heard. And
Speaker 1: I have a real place in this. I know how
Speaker 1: I can make this better. So just because I don't have,
Speaker 1: you know, the training from the academy, it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: at all all. I just had the right sensibility and therefore,
Speaker 1: and I'm and this is going to influence the world.
Speaker 1: I have no idea how commercially successful it'll be, but
Speaker 1: I know it's going to have the influence. And that's
Speaker 1: what I wanted to do. And frankly, it's the same
Speaker 1: thing with the Toggy Heads is that when I met
Speaker 1: the Talking Heads, I went, nobody's doing this, and I
Speaker 1: have a there's a place for me to make this
Speaker 1: even better and condemn it. I'm gonna do it. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about Jonathan himself. I happen to be a
Speaker 1: big fan. Only album that you're on, Pablo Picasso, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And Roadrunner. I always thought I'm gonna make an analogy,
Speaker 1: which is bad. Um. I have some history with Jene Simmons,
Speaker 1: and what shocked me about Gene Simmons is he is
Speaker 1: that guy. Most people there's two people, there's the front facing,
Speaker 1: and then you know, everybody gets along. Not Gene Simmons.
Speaker 1: I always thought Jonathan Richmond was the same way, but
Speaker 1: now I think there's obvious he's something quirky, something different
Speaker 1: about We had that big opportunity. Those people don't get
Speaker 1: a second round with something about Mary. Whatever you know
Speaker 1: is a guy. He doesn't appear or I hate to
Speaker 1: use word normal, but standard. Well, I absolutely agree with
Speaker 1: you that he's a unique person. In fact, he's showing
Speaker 1: up tomorrow night to do another album with me. I've
Speaker 1: done two albums. Have you heard the album saw I
Speaker 1: did with him? And there's a and and there's a
Speaker 1: follow up record. So I've had two more records with
Speaker 1: him in the last few years. They're on Blue Arrow
Speaker 1: Records out of Cleveland. They are not on any streaming service.
Speaker 1: You have to kind of work to get him. But
Speaker 1: they're amazing and they're unlike any music being recorded right now.
Speaker 1: Right now, he's been down in Tucson doing recording reggae
Speaker 1: tone music and then we're going to add parts starting tomorrow.
Speaker 1: Didn't I read something he got into construction, uh mason masonry.
Speaker 1: I love what he said about it. He goes, you know, Jerry, Ah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people who are saying mason and
Speaker 1: music is their hobby. I'm a musician and masonry is
Speaker 1: my hobby. So someone like Jonathan Richmond, who never really
Speaker 1: sold any records and his music wasn't really covered, does
Speaker 1: he have any money? He seems to have enough to
Speaker 1: live the way he wants to live. He does, He's not.
Speaker 1: He certainly doesn't make decisions based upon trying to have
Speaker 1: enough have to make as much money as possible. He
Speaker 1: makes decisions. You know, he has a wife, he has
Speaker 1: a daughter. It's a second life. And so I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that economic concerns don't affect him. Uh. He just
Speaker 1: bought some property up in Chico. Until he's got a
Speaker 1: lot of I think he has a lot of construction
Speaker 1: to do. He's also been helping this architect of the
Speaker 1: masonry because he's very much into not using Portland's cement
Speaker 1: or very little bit of it, which is the more
Speaker 1: modern way to bind bricks together, which is stronger. He
Speaker 1: likes the Roman lime lime mortar, where you like different
Speaker 1: mortar depending on whether it's in the sun and the
Speaker 1: shade but it lasts longer. So he has long discussions
Speaker 1: with this architect about what percentage of Portland cement and
Speaker 1: lime mortar to use and he loves it. Okay, why
Speaker 1: did he not break bigger? Because everything you're saying is true.
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember he had the song what rock
Speaker 1: in shopping center? I'm talking about balls, even having flags,
Speaker 1: I mean, just incredible insight government center. Right? What why? Um?
Speaker 1: Was there something about him that he couldn't be bigger
Speaker 1: or it just wasn't in the carts. I think that
Speaker 1: there was somewhat of an issue is that when we
Speaker 1: we should have made a record immediately, but we got
Speaker 1: so many offers from record companies and managers that it
Speaker 1: took us a year or so to try and sort
Speaker 1: it all out because we just were considered the next
Speaker 1: hot thing, and Jonathan was uh evolving, and he evolved
Speaker 1: away from the anger and the teenage angst that we
Speaker 1: would say that the first modern Lovers album UH so
Speaker 1: beautifully captures. In addition, David Robinson, the drummer, is a perfectionist,
Speaker 1: so he was never satisfied with the recordings and he
Speaker 1: always wanted to make them exceptionally meticulous, and these were
Speaker 1: two very opposite tracks to be going down. David Robinson
Speaker 1: basically took all the ideas he had for the Modern
Speaker 1: Lovers and he uh brought them to the Cars and
Speaker 1: that's the basis of the sound of the Cars. But
Speaker 1: staying with Jonathan Richmond, you drop out of college, you
Speaker 1: start playing with Jonathan Richmond, Walk me through what that
Speaker 1: period of time? How long until you sign a deal
Speaker 1: and you make this record? Well, So dropped out January
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy one, joined the Modern Lovers. I was
Speaker 1: able to squeeze in the last semester of college while
Speaker 1: in the Modern Lovers, so I got to graduate. And
Speaker 1: in the spring of nineteen seventy two, Lillian Roxon, who
Speaker 1: wrote for the Daily Encyclopedia of Rock the Australians right,
Speaker 1: wrote an article about us that just caused every manager
Speaker 1: and every record company to make a pilgrimage. We were
Speaker 1: living in this small house in Cohasset, Massachusetts, because we
Speaker 1: would we were renting a summer house because we could
Speaker 1: play music there and be loud, and they had come
Speaker 1: down there, and we were making very little money. I mean,
Speaker 1: we were really broke. And I remember Alan Mason from
Speaker 1: from UH from A and M who made many trips
Speaker 1: came out and I find it that Alan don't take
Speaker 1: us out to dinner. Can you just buy us some
Speaker 1: groceries because we just try and eat as much as
Speaker 1: possible when but it's like it doesn't last, which he
Speaker 1: did and he was sleeping on the couch and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. But we had some very funny experiences there. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know, everyone from David Geffen to Steve Paul
Speaker 1: and Danny Fields too, Schiffmann and Larson too, five Davis came.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it was it was so obviously
Speaker 1: it was very hard to make decisions because we were
Speaker 1: all these really good offers and we were trying to
Speaker 1: find the right thing between someone who had the power
Speaker 1: to make things happen, but also the belief of the
Speaker 1: band and the book and you might say the honesty
Speaker 1: that we were looking for, and that was it was
Speaker 1: a tricky thing for us to negotiate. So how did
Speaker 1: you ultimately make a decision? What decision did you make? Well?
Speaker 1: We went with Warner Brothers with John Kle and a
Speaker 1: guy named David Burson who was always uh who would
Speaker 1: have been more Austin's kids tutors and he had been
Speaker 1: given a job as a special assistant to my lost
Speaker 1: and the trouble was that Jonathan had been moving, had
Speaker 1: been moving from a song like uh, modern World or
Speaker 1: she cracked into a song like Hey, their little insect
Speaker 1: by the time we got back to California. And that's
Speaker 1: why the demos that we made with John Cale and
Speaker 1: Alan Mason that we made in the spring of nineteen
Speaker 1: really reflected as best as possible boat what the Bondom
Speaker 1: Lovers were, the early Bondern lovers were really about. And
Speaker 1: that's the record that berserk Lely Records eventually put out. Okay,
Speaker 1: you signed with Warner, what do you do for a manager?
Speaker 1: We eventually went with Eddie Tickner, who managed the Birds
Speaker 1: and Graham Parsons, and we were hanging around with Graham
Speaker 1: Parsons and actually Phil Kaufman, who has the distinction is
Speaker 1: that he's the one who burned Graham Parson's body in
Speaker 1: the desert, was our road manager. In fact, we were
Speaker 1: playing basketball with Graham four days before he died, and
Speaker 1: we played at we played at the party that because
Speaker 1: Phil the had to pay for the coffin uh, the
Speaker 1: family at first wanted to charge him with stealing the coffin,
Speaker 1: but he talked about a pact that Graham he had
Speaker 1: made that whoever died first, the other person would take
Speaker 1: him them out and cremate them at Joshua Tree. Graham
Speaker 1: was a little bit strange from his family. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you know the history of Graham Parsons, but
Speaker 1: his father committed suicide on Christmas Day, and then his
Speaker 1: mother uh married a wealthy gentleman from New Orleans who
Speaker 1: Graham never really got along with. Graham then went to
Speaker 1: the Bulls School in Jacksonville, Florida, which one of my
Speaker 1: roommates in college went to two years behind him. And
Speaker 1: one of my advisers at Harvard had been good friends
Speaker 1: with Graham because Graham had been under him. So we
Speaker 1: had all these kind of connections. Um very sad, one
Speaker 1: of the greatest talents and it's it's it's it's awful
Speaker 1: that that happened and h But anyway, so we were
Speaker 1: with Eddie Tickner and Phil as our road manager. But
Speaker 1: Eddie didn't really do the greatest job as a manager,
Speaker 1: but we just sort of we sort of believe that
Speaker 1: he was honest. It was stupid. You were in Cohassett.
Speaker 1: Were you just in l A to make the record
Speaker 1: that everybody bood? We moved to l A because John
Speaker 1: Cale wanted us to make the record there, so we
Speaker 1: moved in this I think in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: l A, which where we were totally fish out of water,
Speaker 1: and because there was a thing in our contract that
Speaker 1: we did not get all of our advance until we
Speaker 1: had a manager, and then Eddie when he became our manager,
Speaker 1: didn't collect it. So by the time we sort of
Speaker 1: broke up, we had still never gotten our advance, and
Speaker 1: it was we would do things like we'd be walking
Speaker 1: along the street and walked down to the Old World
Speaker 1: restaurant if you remember that. On of course, because we
Speaker 1: were living on King's Road. First we lived over in
Speaker 1: the valley, we moved into a house Emmy Lou Harris
Speaker 1: moved out and we moved into this house on Woodman Boulevard,
Speaker 1: which was maybe insane over there. So finally moved to
Speaker 1: this house on King's Road that was supposed to be
Speaker 1: across from Wolfman Jack. So we'd walk and the police
Speaker 1: would come up next to us in going did your
Speaker 1: car breakdown? We go, no, we're walking and they go like,
Speaker 1: are you sure you're not robbing something? We go, now
Speaker 1: we're walking. They got nobody in l A walks where
Speaker 1: we go? We're not from l A. We're walking. Okay.
Speaker 1: How does it disintegrate and how does the album not
Speaker 1: come out? Well, we tried working with Kale again, and
Speaker 1: I would say that there was a moment where John
Speaker 1: Kale said to Jonathan Jonathan, I want you to be
Speaker 1: play this solo like you feel really mad or me
Speaker 1: and Jonathan went but John, I don't feel matter me
Speaker 1: And I think that he realized at this point that
Speaker 1: the band had changed so dramatically from the year before.
Speaker 1: I actually learned to like guitar because Jonathan had changed
Speaker 1: his guitar parts and I said, I'll play the original parts.
Speaker 1: So actually Jonathan gave me my first guitar, a telecaster,
Speaker 1: and I learned to play all the original parts so
Speaker 1: that I could play them in the studio because he
Speaker 1: didn't want to play them. So how did it literally disintegrate?
Speaker 1: You're sacrificing everything for this band. I'm sure you don't
Speaker 1: want it to break up. No, I didn't want to
Speaker 1: break up, and but it just cut to the point
Speaker 1: that it was like Jonathan. We were not going to
Speaker 1: be flexible enough to go exactly where Jonathan wanted to go.
Speaker 1: Especially David and we you know, there was his ideas
Speaker 1: like we have this body of materially want to do
Speaker 1: a great version of it, then we'll move on. But Jonathan,
Speaker 1: being sort of living in the moment, will say I
Speaker 1: can't do it the same anymore, and so David quit
Speaker 1: and we I think that Jonathan went up and started
Speaker 1: hanging around in Berkeley with Matthew Kaufman who was managed
Speaker 1: this band Earthquake, and then Greg Keen and had this
Speaker 1: what he called a gorilla h record company called berserk Ley,
Speaker 1: and David, Bernie and I drove back to New York.
Speaker 1: Eventually Jonathan came back East and Bernie and I tried
Speaker 1: playing with him again. David had moved to l A
Speaker 1: to play in a different band. Actually, this guy who
Speaker 1: had played in my high school band, Pop Turner, came
Speaker 1: and played drums. He had gone off and fought in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: and I had had moved back and I had convinced
Speaker 1: him that he ought to go to Bennington because he
Speaker 1: was miserable going to school in Milwaukee, which is where
Speaker 1: I'm from and where he was from, and he came
Speaker 1: down to Cambridge and then he played in the Modern
Speaker 1: Levers and we started playing songs that were tried to incorporate,
Speaker 1: incorporated Jonathan's new sound, but trying to do some of
Speaker 1: the old songs. But eventually Jonathan's desire for right to
Speaker 1: be exceptionally quiet. It was sort of like there's just
Speaker 1: no room for the rest of us, and so I
Speaker 1: think Bob and I just said, like, let's say it
Speaker 1: just doesn't work. It's like there's no place for me here. Okay,
Speaker 1: were you aware because you're obviously disappointed the album comes
Speaker 1: out on Berserkilely, like four years later? Did you know
Speaker 1: that was going to happen? And what was that experience? Like?
Speaker 1: I knew it was going to happen because I had
Speaker 1: to sign a contract, which was the worst contract I
Speaker 1: ever signed in my life, because it was Berserkly Records,
Speaker 1: and because I didn't have the money to pay for
Speaker 1: a lawyer to look at it. I didn't even have
Speaker 1: the right to audit sold a billion records. I made
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars. However, it was the best decision I
Speaker 1: ever made because the talking heads would never have knew
Speaker 1: known I existed if I had not made that stupid contract. Wow,
Speaker 1: let's go back to the beginning. You're from Milwaukee. What
Speaker 1: do your parents do for a living? My father was
Speaker 1: an advertising He had commanded a ship at the Pacific
Speaker 1: during World War Two. My mother was a painter, very
Speaker 1: great painter, as my grandmother was an amazing painter as well.
Speaker 1: My aunt was an artist although she died in nine
Speaker 1: but a wonderful photographer. My mom and my aunt had
Speaker 1: gone to Cranbrook at the highlight of Cranbrook when Charles
Speaker 1: Eames and Barrow Serene and Harriet Petoya were there in
Speaker 1: the forties, where it was the leading art school in
Speaker 1: the country, sort of the closest that the United States
Speaker 1: had to the Bow House. So I came from a
Speaker 1: very artistic family. My grandmother played piano and painted and
Speaker 1: did all these things. So I was kind of brought
Speaker 1: up in that, taking art lessons when I was a
Speaker 1: little kid, and uh, taking music lessons. My father had
Speaker 1: played jazz, saxophone and clarinet, fluted a band. That's how
Speaker 1: he supported himself going through college. And had your family
Speaker 1: been in Sucky a while while Milwaukee and ultimately did
Speaker 1: that help you will hurt you. My father's father lived
Speaker 1: on a farm in South Dakota and never he never
Speaker 1: graduated from great school. But he had a bad tooth
Speaker 1: and he dug it out of his mouth with a nail,
Speaker 1: and he did such a good job. He decided he
Speaker 1: would be a dentist. So he took the train to
Speaker 1: Chicago to go to Northwestern And when the train stopped
Speaker 1: in Milwaukee, someone said, there's a very good dental school
Speaker 1: here at Marquette. So probably to say something like cents,
Speaker 1: he got off and went to Marquette and lived there
Speaker 1: for the rest of his life. And did he become
Speaker 1: a dentist. In fact, his models are still in the
Speaker 1: Museum of Dentistry at Marquette. And how many kids in
Speaker 1: your family? I'm an over child, Okay, So you start
Speaker 1: going to school. Are you the leader of the gang?
Speaker 1: Are you the outcast? What's your formative years? What do
Speaker 1: those look like? That sort of depends on what time
Speaker 1: periods you know in I would certainly not saying I
Speaker 1: was the leader of the gang, but I was an
Speaker 1: important member. Will say, but I I certainly understood the
Speaker 1: potential for sort of teenage alienation in high school of clicks,
Speaker 1: trying to get along, trying to be I don't know,
Speaker 1: cool or something like that. The thing that was amazing
Speaker 1: about when I grew up in Milwaukee is bands became
Speaker 1: this really big thing, and the bands up until that time,
Speaker 1: people generally other than athletes only hung out with people
Speaker 1: in their own grade. But bands broke that. We broke
Speaker 1: because we had musicians from different grades in our bands,
Speaker 1: so we knew people in three different grades. I mean
Speaker 1: I did some sports too. I was on the track team,
Speaker 1: so I knew people from that. But the bands and
Speaker 1: like there was like this. My friends had this group
Speaker 1: called the Relaxers, and they said, we stand for everything
Speaker 1: that are anti athlete. Everything that athletes stand for, we
Speaker 1: stand for the opposite. So we're all members of the Relaxers.
Speaker 1: And interestingly, my high school band, the guitar player went
Speaker 1: on to become Leonard Khn's guitar player for years. I
Speaker 1: know Bob because you went to you went to high school.
Speaker 1: My friend Jeff Wiker, Jeff, I know Jeff Wiker right,
Speaker 1: So he moved l A and introduced me to all
Speaker 1: those people. So I sat and then John Paris played
Speaker 1: with Johnny Winner for ten years. The bass player. The
Speaker 1: drummer went off to be a marine and fight at
Speaker 1: Caisson and all the battles in Vietnam, and the lead
Speaker 1: singer of that band went on to become the of
Speaker 1: the American Institute of Architects. Pretty amazing for us, and
Speaker 1: the people around us are the Zucker brothers who made Airplane, Ghost,
Speaker 1: Naked Gun and all of those movies. So a little
Speaker 1: suburban high school in Milwaukee put out an awful lot
Speaker 1: of great art. Okay, I went to school in the
Speaker 1: suburbs in Connecticut, fifty miles from New York City, and
Speaker 1: nobody broke through. So what was in the water? Why?
Speaker 1: You know? Part of it is there were gigs. Is
Speaker 1: every after every basketball game and every football game, there
Speaker 1: was a gig at the high school that hosted. So
Speaker 1: there was a need for lots of bands. And so
Speaker 1: if you got to be in that good enough to
Speaker 1: be part of that group of bands, you could play
Speaker 1: and you could make a little bit of money. And
Speaker 1: we would go all over town to hear all of
Speaker 1: the different bands, and like going into really dangerous, dangerous
Speaker 1: for coming from a different part of town and slightly
Speaker 1: dangerous to go into those neighborhoods. I mean, I was
Speaker 1: at a dance where the Italian Gang and the Puerto
Speaker 1: Rican Gang we just I started, I walked out in
Speaker 1: one minute later the whole thing exploded. You know what
Speaker 1: is it? You know when fools go where a brave
Speaker 1: man fears to tread, or something like that. It was
Speaker 1: sort of like that. Okay, let's go back. You're old
Speaker 1: enough to have music consciousness prior to the Beatles. Was
Speaker 1: your desire to be in a band as a result
Speaker 1: of the Beatles in the British invasion? When did that
Speaker 1: become a thing for you? Now? I was in a
Speaker 1: band before the Beatles were in America, and we did
Speaker 1: R and B music. So your musical training, you took
Speaker 1: piano lessons. I took piano lessons, and then I stopped
Speaker 1: playing piano and I played saxophone in the high school band,
Speaker 1: trying to be like my father a little bit. And
Speaker 1: then I was in a Dixieland band playing saxophone and
Speaker 1: freshman year of high school and then soft my year,
Speaker 1: this drummer the Vie the Marine. So I want to
Speaker 1: form a band. I think you should play keyboards, and
Speaker 1: so I started playing keyboards in that band what we're
Speaker 1: called the Walkers. Okay, and so to what degrease since
Speaker 1: you started before the Beatles, to what degree to the
Speaker 1: Beatles in the British Invasion changed things for you? We
Speaker 1: got um, I would say that less than the Beatles.
Speaker 1: It was more the Yardbirds, the Who and somewhat the Stones,
Speaker 1: the more Blues influenced parts of the British Invasion. That, uh,
Speaker 1: the sort of the Walkers Part two, the one that
Speaker 1: what Bob Metsker switched from playing bass to guitar, was
Speaker 1: very influenced by the English Invasion. So you're going to
Speaker 1: high school to get into Harvard, you have to be
Speaker 1: a pretty good student. So were you very dedicated to academics? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I kind of felt like I had a deal of
Speaker 1: my parents, like if I get good grades and leave
Speaker 1: me alone, And so I did that. To what degree
Speaker 1: were you a bad kid? Testing limits? Uh? Enough? I
Speaker 1: mean obviously the people that did a lot worse, But
Speaker 1: I don't know. Lots of getting drunk, lots of dangerous driving,
Speaker 1: lots of I mean, the other thing that was great
Speaker 1: is that when you're in a band and you have
Speaker 1: to do you want to get something to eat after
Speaker 1: your parents get really use to you getting home at
Speaker 1: two or three in the morning. Up until that time.
Speaker 1: There was one time when I think freshman year, where
Speaker 1: I had a girlfriend and I walked home and they
Speaker 1: had called the police because they were worried about me.
Speaker 1: By the time I was in a band, they kind
Speaker 1: of expected that I would be getting home late. And
Speaker 1: when you go to college, do you bring a keyboard,
Speaker 1: do you bring instruments? Or you first think you're gonna
Speaker 1: leave that behind. I sold everything. I thought, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: wear a suit in the tie as a whole new
Speaker 1: part of my life. And then I got to college
Speaker 1: and Ernie Brooks, who lived in my same dormitory, form
Speaker 1: to band, so I'd go watch him play, and I went, well,
Speaker 1: I'm as good as these guys, I can join this band.
Speaker 1: So I joined that band, and then I went home
Speaker 1: and uh one of my couple of summer jobs. One
Speaker 1: one year before I went to Harvard, I went I
Speaker 1: worked in a lockwasher factory, which was quite an experience.
Speaker 1: And then the next year I worked at Evan Route
Speaker 1: in the industrial relations department. And when I came back
Speaker 1: from that, the Fender dealership for the entire United States
Speaker 1: was for the for the entire Midwest was in Milwaukee.
Speaker 1: Miss Pedal gets hard player named of Ralph Hansel. So
Speaker 1: I went out to West Alice Music and I went
Speaker 1: shopping buying news stuff and I drove it trailer back
Speaker 1: and it was like Christmas for the band I bought brought.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I spent like two thousand dollars and
Speaker 1: got like six amplifiers and mics and all this stuff.
Speaker 1: And so we started rehearsing and then the band Albatross
Speaker 1: it was called. Then we were playing at Harvard like
Speaker 1: outside when we shut down the university in nine and
Speaker 1: we were playing out on the lawn and we were
Speaker 1: a part. You know. There were sort of three or
Speaker 1: three or four bands there that were There was a
Speaker 1: band called the Far Cry that I think signed to Columbia.
Speaker 1: There was an amazing musician, Peter Ibers, who had a
Speaker 1: band called the Class Bead Game named ultimately with Peter Ivers.
Speaker 1: Would got killed downtown l A. Yes, I think beaten
Speaker 1: to death with a hammer. That's hard. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: a girlfriend. Lucy Fisher and I are still close. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you got the equipment, you're playing, you're you're there
Speaker 1: on the heavy days and but this is always a hobby. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I'm thinking I'm going to be At first
Speaker 1: I thought I wanted to be a scientist, and then
Speaker 1: I decided I wanted to be an architect, but then
Speaker 1: I didn't like the There was a new major at
Speaker 1: Harvard called Visual and Environmental Studies. I was starting my
Speaker 1: sophomore year, so I was the first class. But when
Speaker 1: I started going to the classes, I went, they don't
Speaker 1: have this together, and I don't. So fortunately I was stubborn,
Speaker 1: and uh I was. I took a design carse sophomore year.
Speaker 1: Now I hadn't done any art in years, but I
Speaker 1: had done it with my mother when I was growing up,
Speaker 1: and so I took this design carse. And then my
Speaker 1: junior year I really was did not like the guy
Speaker 1: who taught the next year of design. I used to
Speaker 1: have run ins with him in the shop. He was
Speaker 1: an anal compulsive, which was the opposite of me. So
Speaker 1: I just kind of didn't go to the class. And
Speaker 1: there was the most advanced class. So I went up
Speaker 1: heirs to the most advanced class and I said, can
Speaker 1: I take this class? And it was like this guy,
Speaker 1: this wonderful sculpture named Mirco Basadala, who recently. I was
Speaker 1: at the Rockefeller estate that's in Westchester, and I was
Speaker 1: looking at this sculpture and I'm going, this looks familiar,
Speaker 1: and it was Mirco and there was a he had
Speaker 1: a new assistant named Paul Rotterdam, and I go, can
Speaker 1: I take this class? I go, well, there's only five
Speaker 1: people taking you. What do you think? Sure you can
Speaker 1: take it. And so I had the waging experiences that
Speaker 1: I had six hours a week with two brilliant, if
Speaker 1: not genius professors, and there was one other girl and
Speaker 1: me were the only two people in the class that
Speaker 1: really worked hard. So we had like a personal apprenticeship
Speaker 1: with these people. Mirco passed away halfway through the year,
Speaker 1: and then Paul took over, and then Paul became my mentor.
Speaker 1: He I took independent on studies with him, and then
Speaker 1: he became my thesis advisor. Eventually I moved to New
Speaker 1: York and built his loft with him. I hung his
Speaker 1: shows at Susan called well Um. I had a one
Speaker 1: man show at the Carpenter Center Um of my sculptures
Speaker 1: and paintings. But the modern levers played at SO really
Speaker 1: changed my whole life. But it was like that decision
Speaker 1: of like, oh, I'm not going to go to that class.
Speaker 1: I can't standard. I did a number of things in
Speaker 1: college that I when I look back on, it was
Speaker 1: like I can't believe that I sort of had the
Speaker 1: balls to do that. But I just went up and
Speaker 1: this is what I want and people went Nobody else
Speaker 1: asks Okay, So anyway other than the academics, uh, what
Speaker 1: was the social situation? Into what degree did that change?
Speaker 1: You would Harvard lives. Well, there was the unique time
Speaker 1: at Harvard where unlike if you watch the social network,
Speaker 1: all of the sort of fine old clubs that you
Speaker 1: know in the social network that people are trying to
Speaker 1: get into, people were identifying with sort of the war
Speaker 1: in Vietnam soldiers and the working class. And there were
Speaker 1: a lot you know, there are a lot of self
Speaker 1: identified communists. There was the Progressive Labor Party. I was hiding,
Speaker 1: you knew the situation? Is there one more? Do I believe?
Speaker 1: The situationists? French revolutionary French revolutionary Malcolm McClaren was incredibly
Speaker 1: influenced by them. So they came over and they were
Speaker 1: disrupting classes. And I will tell us a little about
Speaker 1: who they are what they're about. So they believed that
Speaker 1: the revolution was not about the workers student alliance, but
Speaker 1: it was about defining the the places in the culture
Speaker 1: where the uh interests of the general society we're being
Speaker 1: manipulated by we'll say, the ruling class. And so they
Speaker 1: would create uh sort of events that would elucidate this.
Speaker 1: There's one of the main writers is a guy named
Speaker 1: gud Board. Actually, many of the people that sort of
Speaker 1: ended up taking over France began as situationists, and as
Speaker 1: I said, and Malcolm was very influenced by so when
Speaker 1: he did sex and all of that, that really grew
Speaker 1: out of the situation is thinking. So they came over.
Speaker 1: Some of them were down at Columbia, some of them
Speaker 1: came from France, and they were in our in our
Speaker 1: living in my room, and I was disrupting classes with
Speaker 1: them and things like that. Um, and they kind of
Speaker 1: they also introduced me to the to the psychiatrists, Wilhelm Reich,
Speaker 1: you know him, Yeah, yeah, so I was and I
Speaker 1: found him really fascinating and I wrote a lot of
Speaker 1: papers about him. But let me do this day. Of course,
Speaker 1: you know, roll thing comes out of him. Arthur Jane
Speaker 1: comes off of him, all of this other stuff we
Speaker 1: started by Reich, and of course Rich is amazing. The
Speaker 1: they took his books out of the library at Congress
Speaker 1: and burned them. They put him in jail. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's an amazing figure. So he they and they also
Speaker 1: kind of believed in free love. But it was basically
Speaker 1: the guys in the group wanted to hook up with
Speaker 1: our girlfriends, and the girls in the group weren't that
Speaker 1: We're willing to hook up with us, but they weren't
Speaker 1: all that attractive. And I remembered there was this time,
Speaker 1: you know, I had gotten into this thing about Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm suspicious of this. So am I suspicious of this
Speaker 1: because of the way I was raised in my training,
Speaker 1: or do I have an intuition that this is bullshit?
Speaker 1: And how do I distinguish between those two uh trains
Speaker 1: of thought? And I remember this girl coming up and
Speaker 1: sitting next to me, and she goes, so, what do
Speaker 1: you think about what we're saying? And I said, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna trust my intuition, and I said, I think you're
Speaker 1: completely full of ship. But it was an amazing time.
Speaker 1: It was Harvard was unlike it was at any other time.
Speaker 1: It was not all about just being rich. The rich
Speaker 1: people kind of hid that they were rich, and and
Speaker 1: to a degree, the working class was ascended totally unique.
Speaker 1: You know, I was invited to enjoying a final club
Speaker 1: and oh, I don't want to do that, so I know.
Speaker 1: So it's like, you know what, it's funny. I remember
Speaker 1: being counted go to a football game. You can't go
Speaker 1: to the football game. Same thing. So you said, you
Speaker 1: mentioned right and jan Off and all these people. What's
Speaker 1: your experience with therapy if any. I've never done it.
Speaker 1: I've always thought that I'd like to do it because
Speaker 1: I think it's sort of would be fascinating. I've read
Speaker 1: enough about psychiatry and stuff like that. It um. I
Speaker 1: think the cognitive uh c G I is very effective
Speaker 1: for changing your behavior, but it doesn't really get at
Speaker 1: maybe why you have certain phobias or things like that.
Speaker 1: You know. I thought that Ardi Lang was really fascinating
Speaker 1: because he thought the schizophrenia was part of a healing
Speaker 1: process and stuff like that. I've had all these amazing
Speaker 1: things where I meet psychologists or new psychiatrists and I
Speaker 1: bring up these authors and they've never heard of any
Speaker 1: of them. I really, what are they teaching you in college,
Speaker 1: It's like, how could you not know who Adler is
Speaker 1: or who Right is or you know, I know, you
Speaker 1: know Freud is. And the same thing is like they
Speaker 1: don't know who Irban Goffman, sort of the inventor of
Speaker 1: group psychology. It's like, what what are they teaching? Are
Speaker 1: you that well adjusted that you don't need any therapy?
Speaker 1: I think the therapy would be an exploration and it
Speaker 1: would probably make me well more well adjusted. But I
Speaker 1: think that I'm happy and I've found my ways to
Speaker 1: I don't know, confront whatever issues I think I need
Speaker 1: to confront, But I think they'd have probably been helpful,
Speaker 1: but to a degree. Really doing therapy takes time, like
Speaker 1: a lot of time, and I knew, you know, and
Speaker 1: I also see that people kind of get addicted to it.
Speaker 1: There was a philosophy professor who was the leading expert
Speaker 1: on Wittgenstein, who was head of the philosophy department at Harvard.
Speaker 1: It also happened to be gay, and he and I
Speaker 1: became really good friends, and you know, he would go like, well,
Speaker 1: Fritz Pearls was my psychiatrist for a long time. The
Speaker 1: guy started sling, But then I thought I needed something more,
Speaker 1: so I switched to a Freudian and I'm like, this
Speaker 1: is an addiction. It's like a lifelong addiction of trying
Speaker 1: to examine your problems all the time. So I'm uh,
Speaker 1: I think it has a real place. You read the
Speaker 1: case studies where they do fantastic things. I think that
Speaker 1: it can be very very useful, and I think that
Speaker 1: probably everybody could learn a lot from it. But I
Speaker 1: think you could. I think you can learn awful lot
Speaker 1: by self examination when you read the books and thinking
Speaker 1: about what they're talking about. Mark's very interesting because he
Speaker 1: believes that he was the first one to make a
Speaker 1: connection between what you're thinking and how you hold your
Speaker 1: body and your musculature. He told one, um uh, you
Speaker 1: know one is what he called character armor, and then
Speaker 1: he called it body armor. And so have you ever
Speaker 1: had the thing where you have anxiety and your and
Speaker 1: you kind of feel in your chest. It's almost like
Speaker 1: there's a band around your chest when you're feeling well,
Speaker 1: if you make yourself gag, it'll go away. And so
Speaker 1: he had all these methodologies to using uh uh, what
Speaker 1: are the um reflexes as a way is what he
Speaker 1: called dissolving the energy that was in the body armor,
Speaker 1: and then it would help dissolve the psychological characterological construct
Speaker 1: that was connected to that body armor. We of course
Speaker 1: believed that the orgasm was the most important, so he
Speaker 1: would watch people having sex and it's like he really
Speaker 1: went off. And I think he also believed in that
Speaker 1: oregon and energy within the atmosphere. It's a little bit
Speaker 1: like Telly Shardon and the idea of there being some
Speaker 1: kind of life force, which of course has gone out
Speaker 1: of favor and science. But you know, maybe we just
Speaker 1: haven't developed the tool to be able to sense it.
Speaker 1: I mean, they've never really explained acupuncture adequately, you know,
Speaker 1: and yet there's you know, there's empirical evidence that it works.
Speaker 1: So he was, you know, he in any ways was
Speaker 1: mimicking what a lot of Eastern things do, but saying
Speaker 1: it within a Western frame of mind. And of course
Speaker 1: he was hunted down by Hitler because he was associated
Speaker 1: with the Socialists and setting up camps and stuff like
Speaker 1: that about hygiene and health. And he went to Norway
Speaker 1: first and then came the United States and and he
Speaker 1: was up at Rangely Lakes up in uh in Maine.
Speaker 1: He thought he could change the weather with Yeah. He
Speaker 1: nicknamed this stuff called orgon energy and that you could
Speaker 1: collect it or or disperse it. And William Burrows wrote
Speaker 1: this big and rolling stone about going to visit Paul
Speaker 1: Bowles and sitting in an orgon box. So I met Paul.
Speaker 1: I met William Burrows one night with Patti Smith was
Speaker 1: there talking and of course they're talking about poetry. But
Speaker 1: of course when I go out to and go like,
Speaker 1: can you tell me about the Oregon box with Paul Ball,
Speaker 1: that's what I really want to know about it, and
Speaker 1: he goes, there was something there. There was definitely something there,
Speaker 1: So that's what I know about it. Staying on this
Speaker 1: same tip to a degree, you know, being a musician
Speaker 1: is very different. I'll just use architecture because you went
Speaker 1: down that path to a degree, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of unique things. You know, a lot of musicians take
Speaker 1: drugs to come down from the gig. Uh, you get
Speaker 1: the incredible adrenaline hit that other people are unaware of
Speaker 1: band's break up. How did you cope with all this tumultuousness?
Speaker 1: Probably the sort of disintegration on the modern levelage was
Speaker 1: pretty hard. First of all, I had put my own
Speaker 1: money into helping the band survive. So I was really
Speaker 1: broke when it happened, and I knew the potential of
Speaker 1: what we could have done, and it was sad. It
Speaker 1: was just really sad. And it uh. I went back
Speaker 1: to Cambridge and I actually taught at Harvard. Paul Rotterdam
Speaker 1: called me up and said, my teaching assistant quit, can
Speaker 1: you do it? Is it sure? Which was really interesting
Speaker 1: because the student body had changed. They were all about
Speaker 1: getting good grades now instead of about what they were learning.
Speaker 1: When I was in college, people go, I don't care
Speaker 1: what great I got. I want to know what I
Speaker 1: want to learn stuff and the and the and the
Speaker 1: professors found that inspiring. Suddenly the professors were far more
Speaker 1: radical than the students. I would have all these like students,
Speaker 1: especially like you know, people from the law school were
Speaker 1: taking this course and they were trying to get me
Speaker 1: to do their project for them. It's like, what is
Speaker 1: that why you're taking the classes for me to do it?
Speaker 1: It's for you to do it. And then I worked
Speaker 1: for h software development company called Cambridge Computer. But now
Speaker 1: this is the computers before Apple and Microsoft or any
Speaker 1: these companies existed. We were working on IBM main frames.
Speaker 1: And the deck PDP eight and PDP eleven. This company
Speaker 1: could have been Microsoft. It wrote the operating systems, they
Speaker 1: wrote the manuals. They did this. I didn't do too
Speaker 1: much programming. I was trying to be a salesman during
Speaker 1: a that they had a system for school systems that
Speaker 1: I was remarkably unsuccessful at selling. But there was a
Speaker 1: recession in the early seventies, and so getting you know,
Speaker 1: school boards to spend money it was. It was difficult.
Speaker 1: But and there was a chess master that was there.
Speaker 1: They could play twenty of us blindfolded and beat us
Speaker 1: all but everybody was obsessed by chess. So I got
Speaker 1: that's the best I ever was at chess, and that
Speaker 1: that chess bachelor went on to become the world backgammon champion.
Speaker 1: The other thing that was really interesting is that a
Speaker 1: lot of the people in this head far more wild
Speaker 1: and act of sex lives than most of the musicians
Speaker 1: I knew. So that was it was really fascinating. But
Speaker 1: I also learned that when they went home, they read,
Speaker 1: they read manuals, and when I home, I listened to music.
Speaker 1: So I went, I don't think this is my new career.
Speaker 1: I think music is really what I want to do.
Speaker 1: I applied to architecture school and then I put it
Speaker 1: off for a year because I, um, there's an artist
Speaker 1: named Elliott Murphy who came up around the time, all right,
Speaker 1: So I made night Lights with him and went on
Speaker 1: tour with him. I also produced Let's Start from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Elliott was a New York guy. How did you know?
Speaker 1: Elliott Murphy? He knew of the modern Lovers, and so
Speaker 1: when he came up to Cambridge, I think he got
Speaker 1: in touch with us, and then Ernie and I played
Speaker 1: with him, and then eventually I produced that record Milwaukee
Speaker 1: for him, and I just saw him in Paris when
Speaker 1: I was there in November. We're still friends and so
Speaker 1: that's what I did around the computer company, and eventually
Speaker 1: I said, like, I've got to start architecture school before
Speaker 1: as long as I can. And then I started. I
Speaker 1: know that Chris talked about this. It was right as
Speaker 1: I met the Talking Hits. I was starting that. So
Speaker 1: I they were very nice to me that they let
Speaker 1: me finish one semester. I said, my parents will kill
Speaker 1: me if I don't at least finish the semester so
Speaker 1: that I can go back. If I have to just
Speaker 1: to go back to chapter. It's history with the Modern Lovers. Now,
Speaker 1: you went from high school to college, you sold all
Speaker 1: your stuff. When you had that line of demarcation, did
Speaker 1: you say, no, there's a future, you say, I'm not
Speaker 1: playing music. I'm out. I just thought that I'm an amateur.
Speaker 1: There's professionals doing this. I'm a good student. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do something else. And then I saw that other people.
Speaker 1: But I was just as good as the other people
Speaker 1: that were around me. And when I met Jonathan, I said,
Speaker 1: we're as legitimate as any band in the world. And frankly,
Speaker 1: I hate them music that's coming out now, like I
Speaker 1: don't know Emerson, Lincoln Palmer and yes, and it was
Speaker 1: just you know, as I call it. And I think
Speaker 1: it was sort of like the mannerism is the classical painting,
Speaker 1: that it was more about grandios technique rather than great
Speaker 1: songs and things like that. And so John, you know,
Speaker 1: I actually think that the Modern Lovers are sort of
Speaker 1: the beginning of punk music. I mean, we were, of
Speaker 1: course exceptionally influenced by Developt Underground and the Stooges, but
Speaker 1: those they don't seem exactly punk to me. But to me,
Speaker 1: the definition of punk music is I have something to say,
Speaker 1: and no matter how good or bad a musician I am,
Speaker 1: I will find a means to express what I have
Speaker 1: to say. And and because I believe it so much,
Speaker 1: and I will say it was such passion, I'll get
Speaker 1: across to an audience. And I think the Modern Lovers
Speaker 1: were the beginning of that ethos, short and sweet ideas,
Speaker 1: and of course Jonathan very much. You know, when everybody
Speaker 1: was doing drugs, he writes a song called I'm Straight
Speaker 1: and so we were being the opposite. Well that was
Speaker 1: a big thing, you know, in the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1: But just to get the timeline right, how long after
Speaker 1: the Modern Lovers break up do you actually start architecture school.
Speaker 1: I started architecture school in September, and the broader Lovers
Speaker 1: broke up, I believe in the spring of seventy. Okay,
Speaker 1: So how do you ultimately uh connect with the talking gets.
Speaker 1: It's as Chris said, he called me up because he
Speaker 1: got the number through Ernie Books and the Showyer family,
Speaker 1: who I did now up in Maine. He had a
Speaker 1: j S house to Ernie's family's house. Also Steve Paul
Speaker 1: because Steve Paul and Danny Fields were wanted to manage
Speaker 1: the Modern Lovers. Steve Paul had said to the talking
Speaker 1: you had to leasy told me that I would be
Speaker 1: a good choice because they knew because he knew that
Speaker 1: I paid it as well. So I think that we
Speaker 1: I think there were this like this would be a
Speaker 1: good time. It's a music story though, So the first
Speaker 1: time I went down to play with them, like I said,
Speaker 1: I had no money. I mean really I was that.
Speaker 1: I ended up with Ernie moving a family to New
Speaker 1: York and the band van and when we packed the
Speaker 1: van there was no room for my oregan. So I
Speaker 1: drove to New York with a guitar and I walked
Speaker 1: into the the Christentina Davis Loft on Christie Street with
Speaker 1: the guitar. They said, we thought you were a keyboard player.
Speaker 1: I said, well I am, but I played guitar too,
Speaker 1: and there wasn't any room for the keyboard. So I
Speaker 1: brought a guitar. But let's display some music. And we
Speaker 1: started to play some music and it sounded great from
Speaker 1: the moment we started praying. So then I came back
Speaker 1: with the keyboard and I did a show at the
Speaker 1: Lower Manhattan Ocean Club. They also had a horn player
Speaker 1: play with them, and then we went out to New Jersey.
Speaker 1: We played that a private party that is sort of
Speaker 1: immortalized in the pictures on the first album of the
Speaker 1: name of this band is Talking Heads or I'm kind
Speaker 1: of standing off at the side, because that was the
Speaker 1: second time I played with them, And then they came
Speaker 1: up to Cambridge and I I took a week off
Speaker 1: from architecture school and played the Ratskeller in Boston, Lupo's
Speaker 1: Heartbreak Saloon and found in uh in u Ah Providence
Speaker 1: some places at a Clark University. And I think at
Speaker 1: that point, AM going like, this is too good. I'm
Speaker 1: going to do it. I had I had forgotten what
Speaker 1: Chris said about the thing that I wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure they got a record deal, and I think that
Speaker 1: that's probably true. I think that I was like, I
Speaker 1: don't want to spend two years chasing a record deal.
Speaker 1: I want to like get to it and make a record,
Speaker 1: because I had seen what happened with the modern lovers
Speaker 1: waiting around for the right deal and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So but I was I was forever grateful that they rated.
Speaker 1: I joined in January seven, we immediately started getting ready
Speaker 1: to make the first album, and we did went on
Speaker 1: that glorious tour that Chris has talked avented so well
Speaker 1: in his book Opening for the Ramans, which frankly was
Speaker 1: one of the most fun tours I've ever been on,
Speaker 1: because the the audiences in Europe knew about the Ramans
Speaker 1: and the Talking Hits as much from fanzines and articles
Speaker 1: and magazines as from hearing any music. So they go, like,
Speaker 1: we want to go see what's happening in New York
Speaker 1: right now, So they were open minded to seeing the
Speaker 1: Talking Hits with the Mounds, and we would like finish
Speaker 1: our set and usually walk to the back and like
Speaker 1: all of our fans would come up and said, like,
Speaker 1: do you want to go out? And the great thing
Speaker 1: about Talking Hits fans is usually there were people that
Speaker 1: you were very perfectly happy to hang out with. They
Speaker 1: were smart, they were intellectuals, and they had something to
Speaker 1: teach you and talk to you about. So we'd go
Speaker 1: out with them, go all over the towns with them,
Speaker 1: come back, get on the bus the next day with
Speaker 1: the Ramond to go on to the next place. Tina
Speaker 1: actually has the same story as me, but we were
Speaker 1: driving by Stonehenge and I went up to the bus
Speaker 1: drivers that we have to stop. I want to go
Speaker 1: see Stonehead and Johnny Ramone goes, what we're stopping to
Speaker 1: go see a bunch of rocks? But oh god it
Speaker 1: was and the weather was glorious. It was right when
Speaker 1: when h the sex pistols did God save the Queen
Speaker 1: into that thing when they were coming down the tem
Speaker 1: We had this party that they all came to and Johnny,
Speaker 1: Johnny Rotten was a big fan of Roadrunner, you know,
Speaker 1: of course they they did a cover of road Runner.
Speaker 1: It was a fantastic time. Now, was Gary ker First
Speaker 1: already the manager when you came? Or how did you
Speaker 1: get Gary Kurfers? Garry Kurfirst came about a year later,
Speaker 1: and he having gone through not having a manager in
Speaker 1: the modern Lovers, I was very adamant in saying we
Speaker 1: really have to have a manager. Christine and David were
Speaker 1: more business like and more let's say, unified and how
Speaker 1: they thought about it than we had been in the
Speaker 1: Modern Lovers, So they could have gone further, and they
Speaker 1: had done a great job up until then. But there
Speaker 1: comes a time where you're away and things are happening,
Speaker 1: and Ken Kushnik, who worked at Sire Records, introduced us
Speaker 1: to Gary. And Gary had gone through a quite an
Speaker 1: adventure because he had gotten an underactive thyroid. He had
Speaker 1: been the manager of Mountain and a promoter. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you know much about it. Yeah, I know this,
Speaker 1: and I knew Gary. Yeah, so anyway, you know all
Speaker 1: of this. But so by the time he took us on,
Speaker 1: it's not like he had a lot of other acts.
Speaker 1: He had us and he loved coming on tour with
Speaker 1: us and ran his business from the road with us.
Speaker 1: And as Chris said, Gary would explore the towns as
Speaker 1: we went out, and he sort of put together a
Speaker 1: tour that was half top forty clubs and half this
Speaker 1: and half that. I became the road manager. Tina had
Speaker 1: been at and I remember we were playing actually in Milwaukee,
Speaker 1: and he had made a deal like three guarantee, but
Speaker 1: we get of the house after you make five and
Speaker 1: the pro boer because I'm not gonna play you five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. I said, well, let me call Gary. Carry
Speaker 1: gets out the phone. He goes, look, I'm a gambler,
Speaker 1: but when I win, I collect. And if you ever
Speaker 1: want to have any band ever play there again, you're
Speaker 1: gonna pay, so the guy paid me. It was great,
Speaker 1: It was It was an adventure. I mean because of Gary,
Speaker 1: we built our name through touring to a degree that
Speaker 1: another manager we had thought about her I had thought
Speaker 1: about was Ed Bicknell, who had been our agent in
Speaker 1: London and he went on to become Dire Straitsman manager,
Speaker 1: and he would we would have been much more of
Speaker 1: a European act and maybe South America. You know, he
Speaker 1: took a different course, more publicity. So it's interesting to
Speaker 1: think about those choices. But Gary was a master of
Speaker 1: the road and we didn't mind working. Really, the Ramans
Speaker 1: on Us were the only bands that really worked that
Speaker 1: hard on the road that came out of Was it depressing,
Speaker 1: I mean, you're on the way up, but you've got
Speaker 1: to play a lot of places. At first you would
Speaker 1: think we're audience as are not into you, or that
Speaker 1: not many people show up or was that not your experience.
Speaker 1: It was all an adventure, so it was fine. You know,
Speaker 1: we were you know, we were driving around a station wagon.
Speaker 1: I'm just playing. Gary had found this guy named Gary
Speaker 1: Schofield who had a van and who was a sound mixer.
Speaker 1: The way he got the van is he had a
Speaker 1: friend who got stopped by the Connecticut State Police who
Speaker 1: thought he was a danger and shot him in the head.
Speaker 1: And the van sat in the parents garage for about
Speaker 1: five years and Gary finally went over and go like,
Speaker 1: are you gonna do anything with that van? And they
Speaker 1: went just take it away. So he had this free van.
Speaker 1: So Gary ma had a deal with him and he
Speaker 1: made much more money than us. So so I know,
Speaker 1: we we'd go out and like, you know, each of
Speaker 1: us is getting a grilled cheese and He'll goes, I'll
Speaker 1: have the prime rib and so we kind of hated him.
Speaker 1: But Garrett goes, he's too good a deal. You don't
Speaker 1: get it. He mixes you, he helps move the equipment,
Speaker 1: and he's got a van. It's an unbelievable deal. So okay,
Speaker 1: the first album, you know, looking through from an outsider's
Speaker 1: you point, it appears that you wanted to produce the
Speaker 1: record itself and they want a little insurance and got
Speaker 1: Tony Bon Jovie. You of course were in the power station.
Speaker 1: What went on there? Well, Chris and Tina and David
Speaker 1: had done a single with Tony Bon Jovi and they
Speaker 1: wanted something away from the I don't know the punk producers,
Speaker 1: and Tony was known for doing disco and horns and
Speaker 1: things like that. Tony brought in a guy named Lance
Speaker 1: Quinn who was sort of the musical part of the team.
Speaker 1: Tony didn't really get us all. I mean we The
Speaker 1: version he wanted to put a Psycho Killer on the
Speaker 1: album was the one that has cellos. But when we
Speaker 1: got back from the tour of London where we were
Speaker 1: finishing our shows with Psycho Killer, I kind of put
Speaker 1: my foot on and said like, no, we're going to
Speaker 1: do the electric version like we do. Uh, we've been
Speaker 1: doing live and that's what we did and that's what's
Speaker 1: on the album. So but Tony really knew a lot
Speaker 1: about sound. He was in the process of building the
Speaker 1: power station, so we never worked at the power station.
Speaker 1: We made it at a little studio called Sun Dragon,
Speaker 1: a sixteen track studio at Stadium was the engineer. We
Speaker 1: mixed it at Media Sound, where Tony was very involved.
Speaker 1: I just worked with Ed doing atmost mixes of talking hits.
Speaker 1: He still listens so loud it's like I have tonight
Speaker 1: as it was like, oh my god, dude, it was crazy,
Speaker 1: but it was fun. I just remixed all the Talking
Speaker 1: Hits albums for atmost in eight weeks this summer, which
Speaker 1: was Okay. Then let's just go sideways here for a second.
Speaker 1: What's your viewpoint on ATMOS. Well, I was a big
Speaker 1: fan of surround sound, and I did the five one mixes,
Speaker 1: so Eric thorn Gren and I did that. So I
Speaker 1: think that I think surround sound and ATMOS is a
Speaker 1: version of surround sound is great. I think that you
Speaker 1: are putting a computer in between your mix and the
Speaker 1: eventual playback, because the the computer is sort of sampling
Speaker 1: how many speakers do you have and what's the frequency
Speaker 1: of response, and then making the adjustments. Sometimes that can
Speaker 1: be a little bit weird. I also think that the headphones,
Speaker 1: they're not exactly that really don't give you the entire experience,
Speaker 1: but they're fun. They're fun to listen to, and I
Speaker 1: think that a great surrounds on mix is just fantastic.
Speaker 1: Um Our philosophy, you know, this is Eric thorn Gren
Speaker 1: in mine is not to tear the music apart so
Speaker 1: much that you feel like it's all in pieces, but
Speaker 1: to keep the coherence that you have in the stereo mix,
Speaker 1: but to enhance it. So I don't know if you've
Speaker 1: had the chance, but go on Apple Music and try
Speaker 1: listening to it or untitled see what you think. Okay,
Speaker 1: and you live through the quad experiments and all this
Speaker 1: other stuff. Do you think app moos is going to
Speaker 1: be a small thing or it's going to become the default?
Speaker 1: I think that ATMOS is the best chance because I
Speaker 1: think that Dolby and Apple are behind it, and those
Speaker 1: are two pretty powerful companies, particularly Apple. Apple is the
Speaker 1: world's largest corporation, and so that's a that's a much
Speaker 1: better starting place than where we were before. Sony has
Speaker 1: you know, this competitive system, But I don't think I
Speaker 1: don't think it's going to be the beta max phs.
Speaker 1: I think ATMOS is going to be the default system.
Speaker 1: I think that all the cars will have it within
Speaker 1: five years. Already cars have it. I think that every
Speaker 1: a v amp that comes out, we'll have it, will
Speaker 1: be ATMOS ready. Now, are people gonna put in thirteen
Speaker 1: speakers all over their rooms? No, but they have these
Speaker 1: Atmos sound bars and stuff like that. There there's acceptable Okay,
Speaker 1: they're not you know, like everything you know, you've got
Speaker 1: audio file levels that's even better. Okay, so you just
Speaker 1: did all these ATMOS mixes. Let's say you're a band
Speaker 1: on the way up. How much time and money is
Speaker 1: it going to take to put on an atmost mix
Speaker 1: of that record? Well, I think that if every engineer
Speaker 1: understands ATMOS, that they can mix using stems so that
Speaker 1: they can sort of do them at the same time.
Speaker 1: But if you're going back to the reginal material, you've
Speaker 1: got to sort of start over. So I don't think
Speaker 1: it's all that much more expensive if you're using an
Speaker 1: engineer that's familiar with both, And I think the stereo
Speaker 1: mix will always be your basis, the basic thing that
Speaker 1: you're doing, and the utmost is sort of h a
Speaker 1: fun and exciting extra. I've always thought that cars are
Speaker 1: the ideal place for surround sound because you have you
Speaker 1: sit in the same place all the time. So you know,
Speaker 1: I think that we all take our cars. Now, don't
Speaker 1: you adjust the stereo to a little bit to the
Speaker 1: back and to the front. You sort of create a
Speaker 1: Fox surround set up in your car already, so this
Speaker 1: is just a little more defined. Um, I can play
Speaker 1: some of my five one mixes in my cars. The
Speaker 1: mix of burning down the house from the DVD audio,
Speaker 1: it sounds amazing in my car, so I I think
Speaker 1: that must will be great there just to be clear
Speaker 1: in your car stock stereo or aftermarket stereo stock. But
Speaker 1: I have. But I bought an RS seven, which is
Speaker 1: one of the greatest stereos ever made in a car,
Speaker 1: and that is one of the It's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I bought that car. Friend of mine designed. Friend
Speaker 1: of mine design that makes a stereo for the RS
Speaker 1: of it. Panging Old and the tweeters were designed by
Speaker 1: a friend of mine who lives here and Merinn County,
Speaker 1: and he licensed them to be you know, they pop
Speaker 1: up out of the dashboard and then they go down
Speaker 1: and it's it's great. But but when I play, I
Speaker 1: think it's actually defaulting back to the Dolby version of
Speaker 1: the five one. It's distinct in the different speakers in
Speaker 1: my car, so I can hear panning going back and
Speaker 1: forth and stuff like that. So I know what it's
Speaker 1: going to be like to have a was it's great? Okay?
Speaker 1: So he had seventy seven comes out. Were you happy
Speaker 1: with the finished product? Yes, I thought that we were
Speaker 1: a little heavier than the record. It was a it's
Speaker 1: a little clear, you know, but I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: it's very it's very clean and very immaculate, and it
Speaker 1: captured the uniqueness of the band. Certainly. David's voice is
Speaker 1: very you know, he has this, uh, completely unique way
Speaker 1: of singing, you know, probably the most on seventy seven
Speaker 1: and sort of slowly becoming a more let's say, conventional
Speaker 1: is not the right word, but the ability to sing
Speaker 1: in a fuller voice and more what we would think
Speaker 1: of as a good voice. As he progresses, has more
Speaker 1: of his kind of ah h what you know. Used
Speaker 1: to say that his his thing is like it's sort
Speaker 1: of like explosives of excitement, right, and has it has
Speaker 1: more of that. But I think that the records records great.
Speaker 1: I have favorites, so I love No Compassion, which has
Speaker 1: always been one of my favorite songs. Um No, I
Speaker 1: think it's I think who is its great and new feeling,
Speaker 1: you know, it's terrific. I mean I'm excited where we
Speaker 1: went after it because I wanted to go someplace else,
Speaker 1: but I was the first sound was great. Did you
Speaker 1: ever have doubts about the level of success of Talking Heads?
Speaker 1: I always knew we would be an artistic success and
Speaker 1: that we would really influence a lot of people. I
Speaker 1: had no idea about our commercial success. I thought it
Speaker 1: would be medium. We outstripped our commercial success from what
Speaker 1: I predicted. But I didn't do it for the money.
Speaker 1: I did it for the to be have that influence
Speaker 1: on people. And so how did you know get involved
Speaker 1: on the second record, Well, he came to see us
Speaker 1: at the Roundhouse and then we went over to his
Speaker 1: house and we went to this bookstore Compendium, and I
Speaker 1: finally found this book about that Burrows once again had
Speaker 1: written about called about this review of this book Inside
Speaker 1: Scientology by Robert Kaufman, and every bookstore in the United
Speaker 1: States did not have a copy of this book because
Speaker 1: the scientologists bought every one of them so that they
Speaker 1: so that there was no way to find out about
Speaker 1: the sort of, uh say, we're devious things that they do.
Speaker 1: And I found it at this book store, which was
Speaker 1: very exciting, and we just were admired him and said
Speaker 1: we'd love you to work with you, and he goes,
Speaker 1: are you sure I love the sout of talking at
Speaker 1: s And we said, yeah, we're sure. I mean we
Speaker 1: think that Tony knew a lot about sound but he
Speaker 1: didn't exactly understand us, and we'd like to work with
Speaker 1: someone who understands us. And then he brought in Rhet Davy,
Speaker 1: who was a terrific engineer. So and as Chris said,
Speaker 1: it was a magical time down in the ad compass point,
Speaker 1: just wonderful. And other than signing you to what degree
Speaker 1: with Seymour stunt involved, I think with us most of
Speaker 1: the time he just got out of the way. Like
Speaker 1: we designed our own album covers, we made lots of
Speaker 1: our own decisions. Um, he just tried to facilitate us.
Speaker 1: And there were times that when Warner Brothers bought sire Rad,
Speaker 1: if we couldn't get something out of Warner Brothers, Gary
Speaker 1: Kirkers would try and go get it from Seymour. And
Speaker 1: Seymour had a sauce spot for us. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think he was amongst all the bands he signed, we
Speaker 1: were among his very favorites. And so you know, how
Speaker 1: did you end up cutting Take Me to the River? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I listened to your podcast with Chris and
Speaker 1: they talk. It's true that Edo convinced us to slow
Speaker 1: it down, which was the right choice, But I also
Speaker 1: think that very crucial thing is I learned to Take
Speaker 1: Me to the River by David teaching it to me.
Speaker 1: I never went and listened to the original. And the
Speaker 1: difference between sil Johnson or Al Green. It's all on
Speaker 1: the upbeat, It's like and ours just dude, it's like
Speaker 1: very didactic, like a march and and I think a
Speaker 1: lot of that is my Oregon part because I had
Speaker 1: learned it from David and I wasn't trying to mimic
Speaker 1: the original. I've done this movie, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've seen this movie, Take Me at the River about
Speaker 1: Memphis music that I was a producer of. Fantastic movie.
Speaker 1: And so I've now worked with the Hodges brothers and
Speaker 1: play Take Me the Ever with them Teeny Hodges as
Speaker 1: the co writer. So I had to relearn it slightly
Speaker 1: different chords, but also a totally different feeling. So I
Speaker 1: became very, uh a sort of in tune with the
Speaker 1: differences of what our approach was and what theirs was.
Speaker 1: And ultimately the next album, Fear of Music. Tell me
Speaker 1: about the album cover, well, I designed the deck plate.
Speaker 1: It actually was influenced by because Tina's brother, who was
Speaker 1: an architect, lived in the same loft building as Christentina
Speaker 1: and me and he he used a rubber version of
Speaker 1: dech plate. It's an anti skid surface that you'll find
Speaker 1: on the backs of Ford pickup trucks on uh Sewert.
Speaker 1: You know those doors that opened for elevators to come
Speaker 1: out of the sidewalk in New York City. And I
Speaker 1: thought this would be a great cover. So I am
Speaker 1: what So I called up the company that was making
Speaker 1: this vinyl flooring and I said, can you make it
Speaker 1: thinner so we could use it for an album cover?
Speaker 1: And they go, now, you know, we can't change our presses.
Speaker 1: We can't do that. And I'm going, well, if we
Speaker 1: sell a half a million records, I said, well, what
Speaker 1: about it for an order of a million square feet?
Speaker 1: So I got the president on the on on the line.
Speaker 1: But eventually we came up with that the tolerances of
Speaker 1: getting it the thin, that it wouldn't cost too much,
Speaker 1: it just wasn't gonna work. Then the Queen's Litho, we
Speaker 1: can't do this, but eventually they came around. We had
Speaker 1: the same problem with the day Glow for talking at
Speaker 1: seventy seven Queen's Litho, like, we can't put that kind
Speaker 1: of ink in our in our presses. So David and
Speaker 1: I started calling all of these record manufacturer verse from
Speaker 1: out in the Midwest that did poker covers that used
Speaker 1: Dayklow all the time, and then we said, okay, well
Speaker 1: we're going to use this place in Ohio they do
Speaker 1: day Clow all the time. Well, of course at that
Speaker 1: point queens Litho said, of course we'll do it. And
Speaker 1: then of course Very Music got nominated for a Grammy,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, queens Litha, we're petting themselves on
Speaker 1: the back and David, uh, sort of just the type
Speaker 1: is basically to look like an IBM S Electric And
Speaker 1: then I found a friend of mine was working the
Speaker 1: same marine who had been the drummer in the Modern Lovers,
Speaker 1: was working for this cancer doctor. And you know, David
Speaker 1: had thought of the idea of the lands At photo
Speaker 1: for the back of of more songs about buildings and food.
Speaker 1: So we were like really excited by things that were
Speaker 1: imagery that was interesting and beautiful but had a meaning
Speaker 1: beyond being sort of artistic. Okay, so the inside cover
Speaker 1: is a heat sensitive photograph that was used in trying
Speaker 1: to detect press camp cancer in the seventies. So we
Speaker 1: all got our pictures taken, but David's just came out
Speaker 1: looking at the sort of weirdest and coolest, So we
Speaker 1: used that and life during the Wartime. Did that come
Speaker 1: to you from David totally totally done? Or to what
Speaker 1: degree was the band involved? David and I came up
Speaker 1: with I think I came up with the chorus, and
Speaker 1: he came up with the verse, and christ and Tina
Speaker 1: said that they had come up with something independently that
Speaker 1: that led to the song. So we ended up sharing
Speaker 1: that between the four of us. Um, I don't I
Speaker 1: didn't quite understand what Chris and Tina were what what
Speaker 1: they exactly referring to, because it was something that they
Speaker 1: said they had done, but you know, it was that
Speaker 1: was so it was that's what we did. I mean,
Speaker 1: Fair of Music is an interesting cover because it's the
Speaker 1: only song time where I got to write with David,
Speaker 1: just the two of us. So I co wrote Heaven,
Speaker 1: I co wrote wrote Memories Can't Wait, and I co
Speaker 1: wrote mind You know. Then one after remain in Light
Speaker 1: and we had this whole thing that I know you
Speaker 1: talked to Chris about about this whole group writing experience.
Speaker 1: I never had the opportunity to be sort of one
Speaker 1: on one with him, so remaining like, give me your
Speaker 1: version of how that comes together. Well, I think it
Speaker 1: begins with when we did the Fair of Music. We
Speaker 1: had recorded the song that became the Zimbra, but we
Speaker 1: never came up with lyrics. So we were sitting at
Speaker 1: Atlantic Records listening to all the mixes. We're about to
Speaker 1: jump on a plane to fly to New zealand, go
Speaker 1: on to Australia through Perth, then fly to play Pink
Speaker 1: Pop in Europe with a like a week vacation in Europe,
Speaker 1: and so we're at that. We listened to it and
Speaker 1: I go, can we just put on I don't know
Speaker 1: what we called it at that point, track sixteen, and
Speaker 1: we put it on and I think everyone went, that's
Speaker 1: got to go on the record. So David and I
Speaker 1: flew back from Perth thirty hours to New York to
Speaker 1: finish uh Zimbra, and that's when Brian came up with
Speaker 1: the idea of using the Hugo ball poem. And then
Speaker 1: David and I went to the mastering lab with Eno
Speaker 1: and then left there and went and flew all night,
Speaker 1: went and played Pink Pop in Europe. But I think
Speaker 1: we all realized that the that that zimbra and it's
Speaker 1: influenced by African music was what we wanted to do next.
Speaker 1: And so all of us were listening to Fella and
Speaker 1: Manage to Coti that's the name of a restaurant, Manta
Speaker 1: da Bango, and various other things, and and we then decided,
Speaker 1: uh that we would not write ahead of being in
Speaker 1: the studio, but just do it in the studio itself,
Speaker 1: because we had realized that sometimes the first time you
Speaker 1: play a song, there's an innocence and there's a way
Speaker 1: that you play it that's different than you'll ever play
Speaker 1: it again. And we went to capture that. And so
Speaker 1: we got down to compass point we were working and
Speaker 1: Rhet Davies was going to is that it was the
Speaker 1: engineer who had done more songs about buildings and food.
Speaker 1: Then you know, got wind of it and he suddenly
Speaker 1: was showed up and you know, getting there, Rhett was
Speaker 1: wanting to sort of get out from under you know's
Speaker 1: you know wing will say, so he quit and then
Speaker 1: you know, tried engineering but he's not he can't do it,
Speaker 1: I mean, or he's so slow. It was, it was
Speaker 1: ridiculous and the assistant a compass point, couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: So then Dave turn flew in because he had been
Speaker 1: working in My Life and the Bush of Ghosts with
Speaker 1: David and you know, and he was the engineer, and
Speaker 1: he then went on to be the engineer on my
Speaker 1: first solo record, The Red and the Black. We got
Speaker 1: to be good friends and we were often going out
Speaker 1: and people doing one thing at a time, sometimes a
Speaker 1: couple of things at a time. And and uh boards
Speaker 1: back then had a way of locking mutes, so you
Speaker 1: could have an A button that had the mutes of
Speaker 1: one group and then be the other. So we would
Speaker 1: sort of do parts and assign them to the A
Speaker 1: group and the B part and go back and forth.
Speaker 1: And that's really how we wrote the record, with these
Speaker 1: groups of A groups of B. I don't I don't
Speaker 1: think there's very many C parts in the record. I
Speaker 1: think it's all A B, A B, sometimes different lyrics,
Speaker 1: but A B, A B. Then we you know, had
Speaker 1: a commitment had to leave, and we decided we went
Speaker 1: back to New York, which I think was in some
Speaker 1: ways we lost our momentum. And I went around and
Speaker 1: negotiated with all the studios in New York to find
Speaker 1: us the best deal, and we ended I had produced
Speaker 1: Nona Hendricks down at Philadelphia Sigma Sound, and I loved
Speaker 1: how professional they were. So I went to Sigma Sound
Speaker 1: and I convinced them that they being an R and
Speaker 1: B studio, that by having us, we could be a
Speaker 1: lost leader for them to get rock bands to come
Speaker 1: to them. So I got us this unbelievable deal there.
Speaker 1: Um I asked Gary Kirfurst, if you negotiated with him,
Speaker 1: and he goes like, no, nobody would do better the
Speaker 1: way you already got. I just said, I want Jerry Steele.
Speaker 1: So we went there. But David had kind of writer's cramp,
Speaker 1: let'll say romain and I was a very hard record
Speaker 1: to write melodies of lyrics too, because there it's modal,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have chord changes to go to places. So
Speaker 1: he's ruggled. And he then started picking up an instrument
Speaker 1: and started playing along to things, and this started to
Speaker 1: mutate what had come out of the Bahamas, which I
Speaker 1: think was quite frustrating to Christentina because they loved what
Speaker 1: had come out of the Bahamas. But it was sort
Speaker 1: of a necessary evil for David to get back into
Speaker 1: sort of being inside the music and then coming up
Speaker 1: with lyrics and uh melodies. And I was there for
Speaker 1: every minute of it, and I mean sometimes just watching,
Speaker 1: sometimes putting in my two cents. By the time it
Speaker 1: was ending, we had been offered to play up at
Speaker 1: the Heatwave Festival and to play in Central Park that
Speaker 1: Ron Telser had this series, and we go. I'm talking
Speaker 1: to David. I was like, how are we gonna record?
Speaker 1: How are we gonna play all this music? So he
Speaker 1: and I sat down and going like, Oh, we're gonna
Speaker 1: another keyboard player, were another guitar player, We're gonna need
Speaker 1: background singers. I had brought in, by the way, Nona
Speaker 1: Hendricks to sing on the record. Brian goes like, oh,
Speaker 1: she'll take too long, that all singers they sing out
Speaker 1: of tune, and I went, Brian, trust me, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be great. And of course the minute she was there,
Speaker 1: he was in heaven. So it was great. So we
Speaker 1: got to the point that we were to be ready
Speaker 1: for playing this show. David Flute to l A to
Speaker 1: mix at El Dorado Studios with with Dave Jordan, and
Speaker 1: I stayed with Eno and John Potoker at Sigma and
Speaker 1: did other songs. Meanwhile, I went out. I went out
Speaker 1: one afternoon and hired Bernie Adrian Blue to let McDonald
Speaker 1: busted Jones. A day or so later, we found Steve Scales.
Speaker 1: So I go back. I come back and go like,
Speaker 1: we have the most incredible bad on earth. And so
Speaker 1: we were rehearsing at Britanny Away, which was owned by
Speaker 1: Pink Floyd out in Long Island City. So I called
Speaker 1: up everybody and I made this deal with him. I said,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna hire you for two weeks. We're doing two shows.
Speaker 1: You're gonna make this money per per week. And uh,
Speaker 1: Bernie's wife Judy goes, who I'm still friends with, She goes,
Speaker 1: that was the clearest and the best negotiation I've ever
Speaker 1: had in my life. Everything you said happened exactly as
Speaker 1: you said it. The first day. So I was teaching
Speaker 1: everybody the song, and everybody thought I was the leader
Speaker 1: of the band, and then David shows up. They go like,
Speaker 1: who's he? And then he started singing the song and
Speaker 1: they like, oh, he's the lead singer and he does
Speaker 1: all this other stuff. So and the record is, you know,
Speaker 1: it's the most you know, it's the most influential and
Speaker 1: amazing record we did. I mean, I think my two
Speaker 1: favorites are fair of music and and and remain in light.
Speaker 1: Although speaking in tongues is really been growing on me
Speaker 1: a lot lately. But I love I love, I love
Speaker 1: them all. And it's of course interesting because I haven't
Speaker 1: done the atmos Max is like, they're much fresher in
Speaker 1: my mind. Again, So you play your own music, you
Speaker 1: play your own records, but not that often. Mainly I
Speaker 1: hear him in stores or on the radio and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Okay, Now, Gary told me a story that
Speaker 1: Eno was trying to weazle in to get an equal
Speaker 1: royalty as a member of the band. Is said, I
Speaker 1: earned it, and Gary said, no problem, the band's going
Speaker 1: out on a tour. Just show up, and then that
Speaker 1: solved the whole problem. It's exactly right. You know, he
Speaker 1: was like someone who he had stage right. It's amazing
Speaker 1: that he's such a confident guy. It's amazing stage right.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no way he was going to do that,
Speaker 1: and and and you know he was Edo lost an
Speaker 1: opportunity though, you know, went on to doing music from
Speaker 1: airports at that point, which was which was great, and
Speaker 1: it was sort of the beginning of ambient music. But
Speaker 1: we would have been happy to have been Ino's backup
Speaker 1: band on another record like Remain in Light with him singing,
Speaker 1: had he wanted to do it, so he he lost
Speaker 1: an opportunity to because when he was singing with Nona,
Speaker 1: to me, it's the only time I ever heard him
Speaker 1: sing that didn't seem careful. It seemed like he got
Speaker 1: so into the moment and with her that he started
Speaker 1: to see sing with some excitement in his voice, not
Speaker 1: that sort of careful, pure tone that he does almost
Speaker 1: all the other times. Look, can you tell me about
Speaker 1: Once in a Lifetime? The most the strangest thing about
Speaker 1: Once in a Lifetime was that with the base being
Speaker 1: on the upbeat and the drums on this downbeat, that
Speaker 1: how you mixed it, you could decide that the one
Speaker 1: was one place or a half beat later. There's a
Speaker 1: there's an ambiguity there. The way we went out and
Speaker 1: played it live, everyone has changed the bass part to
Speaker 1: be with the drums. But on the record, if you're
Speaker 1: going one, two, three, four, one done done, done on,
Speaker 1: done on, But if you put the base up louder,
Speaker 1: you think that's the one. So it has this sort of. Uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, uneasyness will say that gives
Speaker 1: it attention that I think is really special to it.
Speaker 1: So Remaining in Light was not only different from the
Speaker 1: previous Talking Heads album, was different from anything else in
Speaker 1: the marketplace. Were you worried about audience acceptance into what degreed?
Speaker 1: Did you think the audience would accept it? Well? I
Speaker 1: think that after we did the tour, but before the
Speaker 1: record came out, we played heat Wave and Central Park
Speaker 1: and everybody went insane for it, so we were pretty confident.
Speaker 1: It took years for the sales to catch up to
Speaker 1: fair of music though, And how did you know Adrian
Speaker 1: Blue and Bernie Warrell and stuff? So Adrian we he
Speaker 1: first saw us at the accident, but we didn't see
Speaker 1: him there. I think that, you know, Mona told us
Speaker 1: about us, and then he came and saw us and
Speaker 1: chammed with us. He was living in Champagne, Urbana, and
Speaker 1: he's from Cincinnati I think originally um and he played
Speaker 1: with us a few times. And how he ended up
Speaker 1: on uh fir on Remaining Light is that I noticed
Speaker 1: that he was playing at the Mud Club. My recollection
Speaker 1: is that I went down and talked to him but
Speaker 1: I guess maybe that he said remembers that Brian David
Speaker 1: and I went down and he came up the next day.
Speaker 1: He tells a wonderful story. He goes, we're no lyrics,
Speaker 1: and he said, well, he went out in the room
Speaker 1: and this is for the Great Curve, one of his
Speaker 1: all time best solos and he ever played in his life.
Speaker 1: And I think. He goes, We'll just listen and when
Speaker 1: you think of solo, should come in play a solo.
Speaker 1: And then when you stop, stop and then listen for
Speaker 1: a while longer, and then come in when you think
Speaker 1: something that would you would play a part for the
Speaker 1: end of the song. So he's getting set up and
Speaker 1: he's listening and he plays it and he goes, okay,
Speaker 1: I think I'm ready, and we go We're finished. That
Speaker 1: was fantastic. It was so great, and we went on
Speaker 1: from there. I then got to He then moved up
Speaker 1: to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin with his first wife, Um, and
Speaker 1: I was gone back to Milwaukee to take care of
Speaker 1: my mother because my father died suddenly. My mother had cancer,
Speaker 1: so I was splitting my time between New York and Milwaukee,
Speaker 1: and I found this little studio called DV recording that
Speaker 1: was in a bomb shelter, and it was actually the
Speaker 1: bomb shelter had been the bedroom of my best friend
Speaker 1: in nursery school in grade school, and he had committed
Speaker 1: suicide after after high school, but his younger brother had
Speaker 1: taken over his parents house and I got to love
Speaker 1: working there. And you know, this was at a period
Speaker 1: where an eight hour block in New York cost a
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and I was getting his studio for a
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a week. But he could do any commercials
Speaker 1: you want. And that's how I taught myself how to
Speaker 1: be a good producer, because I could take the time.
Speaker 1: I was basically working on the record that became Casual
Speaker 1: Gods with him. But then I produced a single for
Speaker 1: a band called It's in Material that was a top
Speaker 1: ten hit in although I took my name off it
Speaker 1: because I was piste off at what they did in
Speaker 1: the mix. In England, I produced the Blind Leading the
Speaker 1: Naked for the Piling Fems. There I produced um Oh
Speaker 1: Elliott Murphy's album Milwaukee. There, I just did a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff and I met my wife there. How do
Speaker 1: you meet your wife? I had tried to pick up
Speaker 1: in a bar with her boyfriend. There was a there
Speaker 1: was these uh there was like some of my favorite
Speaker 1: musicians from Milwaukee had a sort of supergroup will say,
Speaker 1: and all the musicians in Milwaukee would go on like
Speaker 1: Tuesday night to see them. And then a year later
Speaker 1: when I walked in the studio, she was the bookkeeper.
Speaker 1: It was there were a lot of things that had
Speaker 1: to fall. She was engaged to get married. It was
Speaker 1: it was let's say, um with it. It was a
Speaker 1: bunch of things to negotiate. But happily we did it.
Speaker 1: And we're still a little bit slower. She's the bookkeeper.
Speaker 1: You're seeing her all the time. She's engaged. How do
Speaker 1: how do we make the transition? She said. I walked
Speaker 1: in and there was like the electricity was there, and
Speaker 1: she goes, oh, and we started, uh kind of seeing
Speaker 1: each other on the slide because I had a girlfriend then,
Speaker 1: and uh, we just realized that we were the two
Speaker 1: of us were soul mates and we had But it
Speaker 1: took me a while. You know, she was a little
Speaker 1: more decisive than I. Wy I was. It took a
Speaker 1: little while, but we did that and now we have
Speaker 1: three kids and it's great, Okay, and what did the
Speaker 1: guys say. I think that they were I'm happy that
Speaker 1: I found someone that uh, well, I seemed to be
Speaker 1: in love with no no, no guy she dubbed. Well.
Speaker 1: It was hard for him because he was a big
Speaker 1: Talking Hints fan. So at first he was really delighted
Speaker 1: that I was around. Then he realized that maybe wasn't
Speaker 1: so good. But all he had to get over it.
Speaker 1: You know, it was too bad. It was it was messy.
Speaker 1: I'm not you know, it was bessy. Okay. The The
Speaker 1: cover of Heaven is by Iva Davies in Berlin. You
Speaker 1: can uh it's built his ice house on Spotify, you
Speaker 1: can check it out. But you're now going on the
Speaker 1: road with Remaining Light with Adrian. How did that come together? Well,
Speaker 1: I've been thinking about this for ten years that there
Speaker 1: is this YouTube video from Talking Heads in Rome in
Speaker 1: and for Adrian lives in Nashville right now. And as
Speaker 1: I said, I did this movie Take Me the River,
Speaker 1: and we were at the Nashville Film Festival, and we
Speaker 1: did a screening for the Nashville chapter of the Grammys,
Speaker 1: and I don't know, there was just a bunch of
Speaker 1: reasons that I suddenly went to Nashville, and I'd always
Speaker 1: have dinner with Adrian and we just talked about how
Speaker 1: great that was ego. You know, my fans say, that's
Speaker 1: the most joyful concert they've ever seen. And I said,
Speaker 1: we got to find a way to recreate this. And
Speaker 1: then I produced this band, turk Quase, who were big
Speaker 1: fans of Talking Heads, And I said, Adrian had another
Speaker 1: way of using session musicians, So I don't want session musicians. Hey,
Speaker 1: they'll never they won't ever share a room, and you
Speaker 1: know it's not gonna work. So I suggested Turquoise. So
Speaker 1: Turquoise had a show at the Exident and we booked
Speaker 1: a rehearsal room after it, and Adrian I went to
Speaker 1: see them, and then we did a rehearsal one day
Speaker 1: and Adrian goes, you were right, this band is perfect. Uh,
Speaker 1: so we did. So we were was all supposed to
Speaker 1: take place in the fourth anniversary, but of course COVID happened,
Speaker 1: So it's happened over twenty two playing festivals. Eventually Turquise
Speaker 1: broke up. So actually it's not the lead singer and
Speaker 1: not the bass player, but all the other members of
Speaker 1: Turquoise and then Adrian's uh bass player from his trio,
Speaker 1: Julie is now playing bass. It's actually better now because
Speaker 1: Adrian I sing more. And you know, we had an
Speaker 1: amazing experience. We played it Hardly Strictly the Bluegrass Festival
Speaker 1: in San Francisco, Fisco. We played the fifty thousand people
Speaker 1: there in October and after Elvis Costello, and there was
Speaker 1: a a wave of joy that just went over the audience.
Speaker 1: It was It's one of the most remarkable evenings of
Speaker 1: my life. And you can see it by going to
Speaker 1: Hardly Strictly and they will say Jerry Harrison and Adrian Blue.
Speaker 1: So now we're taking it on a more sort of
Speaker 1: serious tour us. It's really a tour for twenty year olds.
Speaker 1: Like five days on, one day off hoping I hold up,
Speaker 1: I mean Minneapolis in February. Sounds kind of dicey to me,
Speaker 1: but that's what I'm doing now. If you look on
Speaker 1: if you look at the tracks you played, the songs
Speaker 1: you played, it was from throughout talking hits career. Is
Speaker 1: it going to be the album remain in Life of
Speaker 1: beginning to end or is it gonna be like that? Now?
Speaker 1: It's like the show in Rome. So it has songs
Speaker 1: from Fear of Music and as Psycho Killer, we do
Speaker 1: one King Crimson song, we do rev it up my
Speaker 1: solo song, and the girls in the Turquoise had been
Speaker 1: doing Slippery People, and so since maybe his Staples does
Speaker 1: Slippery People, uh, we are doing a version of Slippery
Speaker 1: People that the girls in the band sing. So we're
Speaker 1: sort of we're sort of venturing three songs away from
Speaker 1: what we did in Rome, and we've we've thrown out
Speaker 1: a couple of the songs from Rome, but we're not
Speaker 1: it's not we're not going any further into the Talking
Speaker 1: Hits career, except for of course, Slippery People Beyonder Man
Speaker 1: in Life. Oh okay, when was the last time you
Speaker 1: were on a tour other than these one offs that
Speaker 1: I've done with this, It would have been I think
Speaker 1: the tour for uh hm, no talking just heads with
Speaker 1: christ and Tina. And how many years ago was that?
Speaker 1: Nineties six or some long time? Okay, tell me about
Speaker 1: the genesis of the movie and how you felt about
Speaker 1: the movie with the Big Suit, et cetera. Well, the
Speaker 1: original band, which was what Adrian and I are trying
Speaker 1: to capture, started. Adrian left to join King Crimson, which honestly,
Speaker 1: I recommended that he do. I thought it was a
Speaker 1: very good move for his career, even though I missed
Speaker 1: him the idea that he'd be playing for us and
Speaker 1: we and Alex we are joined a band. Uh don't
Speaker 1: let McDonald got stolen by the police. Tina rightly realized
Speaker 1: that having two bass players was confusing. I think that
Speaker 1: David and I heard that there were places on remaining
Speaker 1: like where there were two basses, and we were trying
Speaker 1: to emulate that. But on stage there were times in
Speaker 1: that band where it was like very abstract. It was
Speaker 1: like one side of the band went this way and
Speaker 1: one side of the band went this way. I wish
Speaker 1: we had recordings of every night because it would have
Speaker 1: been like Charles Eves or something that would have been fantastic.
Speaker 1: So and so it got a little more locked down
Speaker 1: when we did the tour for speaking in Tongues and
Speaker 1: then and it was getting a little more visual. And
Speaker 1: then David um, you know, he had done the Catherine
Speaker 1: Wheel with Twilt Tharpe, which actually I worked on for
Speaker 1: quite a while as well, and he I think it
Speaker 1: was getting more into like staging. He had worked with
Speaker 1: Robert Wilson on the Civil Wars, So I think he
Speaker 1: wanted to do something that had that visual element, and
Speaker 1: so he started talking to stage designers and other stuff
Speaker 1: and coming up with ideas, and a couple of a
Speaker 1: few ideas we threw in and uh, it got sort
Speaker 1: of designed that way. The big suit comes from Kabuki
Speaker 1: theater and he had two of them made. A friend
Speaker 1: of mine who I knew, designed the one that he
Speaker 1: used the most. And you know, this idea of building
Speaker 1: the stage we had sort of, you know, in the beginning,
Speaker 1: like even a heat wave. We came out as a
Speaker 1: foresome and then grew into the band. So this idea
Speaker 1: of getting of growing from little too big already been born,
Speaker 1: but it became much more going all the way, one
Speaker 1: person at a time by the time we got to
Speaker 1: to stop making sense. And I think one of the
Speaker 1: enduring qualities of stop making sense is that what David
Speaker 1: and the lighting designers came up with used technology that
Speaker 1: really was sort of could have been there in the thirties.
Speaker 1: You know, a rear screen, projection lights, handheld lights. There's
Speaker 1: there was nothing. There were no very lights. There are
Speaker 1: no things that were like of that time period. So
Speaker 1: therefore it becomes timeless, could be could be recreated out
Speaker 1: of like supper stock someplace, or it could be done
Speaker 1: you know, it doesn't rely on technology. How did Jonathan
Speaker 1: Demi get involved? I think he saw the show and said, like,
Speaker 1: this is fantastic. I want to film this. Okay. When
Speaker 1: did you realize that David wasn't going to want to
Speaker 1: do it anymore? Or was that always a factor in
Speaker 1: the back of your mind or was it a shock?
Speaker 1: Have you been through the breakup of the Modern Lovers.
Speaker 1: I thought it was inevitable to happen at some point,
Speaker 1: and my goal was to feel that I was prepared
Speaker 1: for that change to happen. UM. But up through True Stories,
Speaker 1: I thought that we we were just we're going to continue.
Speaker 1: Although I was really disappointed that we'd stopped touring. I
Speaker 1: think there was an element that the success of stopped
Speaker 1: making sense that David I didn't want to uh compete
Speaker 1: with himself, so to speak. Um. There was a moment
Speaker 1: when we did little creatures where we talked about doing
Speaker 1: going to uh doing residencies in different times, like do
Speaker 1: six days at the Beacon and then there's six days
Speaker 1: at the Theater in Chicago and six days of Philadelphia
Speaker 1: and Los Angeles and San Francisco, because then we could
Speaker 1: have had more constant lighting and things like that, but
Speaker 1: his desire to move on to true story sort of
Speaker 1: short circuited that. One of my great disappointments is we
Speaker 1: were offered to play Live Aid and we would have
Speaker 1: killed it. We were the best band of the world,
Speaker 1: I thought at that point live and if you look
Speaker 1: at the success of You two and Peter Gabriel, it
Speaker 1: really grew out of Live Aid and that they also
Speaker 1: we're cognizant of the social issues and could talk coherently
Speaker 1: about those, and we could have done that as well.
Speaker 1: And I tried to get the David to do it,
Speaker 1: but he was too involved in scouting out locations or
Speaker 1: something in Texas and didn't want to do it. Then
Speaker 1: it was like, okay, well, we aren't touring, but we're
Speaker 1: making studio albums. And when we got up to Naked
Speaker 1: Um he had written some songs, but we said, we
Speaker 1: like what we've done. Two albums of you of just
Speaker 1: your songs, when why don't we go back to the
Speaker 1: model of speaking in tongues and remain in light, which
Speaker 1: I don't think he was. I think he was a
Speaker 1: little bit annoyed by that. It's interesting when he came
Speaker 1: out with I think it was Ray Momo, he said
Speaker 1: they were the same songs, but they didn't sound the
Speaker 1: same at all to me. I was in the middle
Speaker 1: of producing the Boudin's at the same time. I just
Speaker 1: had a baby with my wife, so I sure had
Speaker 1: a lot on my mind. But we went off to
Speaker 1: uh to Paris and just had a great time making
Speaker 1: this record and Wally Battery who introduced us to a
Speaker 1: lot of African musicians, and I knew a fellas manager,
Speaker 1: so I was also finding musicians and uh, it was
Speaker 1: great fun there. Um, but I could see that, you know,
Speaker 1: David also had met Bonnie, and Bonnie I think was
Speaker 1: reinforcing red david career. It will say more in the
Speaker 1: art world rather than the rocket world. Rocket rolled world
Speaker 1: was a better avenue for him to go to pursue
Speaker 1: his many interests. And I think that when he got
Speaker 1: on the cover of Time magazine as a you know, filmmaker, musician, artist,
Speaker 1: I don't know what else, dance or whatever it said.
Speaker 1: By this point he had his own office and I
Speaker 1: was like, Wow, this is going to be very hard
Speaker 1: because He's really used to having people now around him
Speaker 1: that always say yes or are very careful where they
Speaker 1: say no. One of the great things about a band
Speaker 1: is you have the honesty of people like don't way
Speaker 1: am I going to do that? And I think the bands,
Speaker 1: uh I have only storious about bands. I think the
Speaker 1: bands are the only successful communist art for UM, because
Speaker 1: it really is can be a group decision. There was
Speaker 1: a visual group that around Victor Vassarelli called the g
Speaker 1: R a V that did optical art at the forties,
Speaker 1: but eventually Vassarelli got discovered as the major uh UM
Speaker 1: talent there. And it's sort of so it broke down.
Speaker 1: But what do you have your own office and you're
Speaker 1: having people who are always supportive? You know, it's sort
Speaker 1: of like the brothers and sisters that are a pain
Speaker 1: in the ass. It's like this, God, do I have
Speaker 1: to deal with them again? So, you know, once he
Speaker 1: was on the cover of Time, I knew that it
Speaker 1: would be a very it would be hard to keep
Speaker 1: it together. David, of course, is filled with ideas. He's
Speaker 1: really really good at efficiently using and sometimes reusing as ideas.
Speaker 1: You know, I learned an immense amount about how to
Speaker 1: do certain things from both Jonathan and David. It's really
Speaker 1: interesting how you'll have an epiphany about something you've been
Speaker 1: struggling with and then you watch somebody else doing you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I could do it that way. I go all the
Speaker 1: way back to I was in kindergarten and the the
Speaker 1: brother of the the guy who had the recording studio
Speaker 1: and the bomb shelter, who was one of my closest friends,
Speaker 1: was this sort of precocious artistic genius. And the teacher
Speaker 1: in kindergarten asked everybody in the class to draw a cat,
Speaker 1: and everybody draw a cat with like, you know, your
Speaker 1: arms straight out like like pegs. But Michael drew it
Speaker 1: like with the cat running like the legs were bent,
Speaker 1: and the teachers showed it to us, like what's different
Speaker 1: about Michael's drawings than you yours? And then kind of
Speaker 1: some people didn't even notice, and it was like and
Speaker 1: it was like, wow, first of all, I'll never draw
Speaker 1: a cat the same, but I've got to look more carefully.
Speaker 1: It's like, is that I'm really look really look hard,
Speaker 1: and so I think that, you know, there have been
Speaker 1: many times in my life where I've met someone and
Speaker 1: sometimes by helping them do things, it's allowed me to
Speaker 1: go like, well, I can do this now I know
Speaker 1: with the route for myself to do it when I've
Speaker 1: been struggling to find the solution to how to do it.
Speaker 1: So both David and Jonathan were inspiring to me in
Speaker 1: that way. So how did you handle emotionally the end
Speaker 1: of the Talking Goods. Well, I had already started making
Speaker 1: solo records and I'd already started becoming a music producer,
Speaker 1: so I just kept going with that. And financially, how
Speaker 1: has it worked out having been a member of Talking
Speaker 1: Heads record royalties which are historically poor songwriting. To what
Speaker 1: degree on how has it been working for you? Well,
Speaker 1: I my mother said, never talked about money, so I'm
Speaker 1: going to be a little bit cautious about this. Um
Speaker 1: it goes up and down. Talky has seen a resurgence lately,
Speaker 1: so it's gone up. As you know. I've been involved
Speaker 1: in a bunch of companies which have some have been
Speaker 1: pretty successful. Those are the kind of things where you
Speaker 1: work ten years on something and then you have a payday.
Speaker 1: But between the two things, we've managed to have a
Speaker 1: very nice life and not overly extravagant but also comfortable,
Speaker 1: So no complaints. And do you know about my snake
Speaker 1: bite company? Do I know about what my company that
Speaker 1: has a antidote for snake bites? No, So I founded
Speaker 1: a company about ten years ago which is going to
Speaker 1: revolutionize the world. Um, mosquitoes killed the most people. Humans
Speaker 1: kill the next most people, and snakes are third. Snakes
Speaker 1: kill a thousand people a year, a may more than
Speaker 1: half a million people a year. Anti Venom is a
Speaker 1: very incomplete and sometimes dangerous therapy, causing anapylactic shock and
Speaker 1: other issues. And we have developed a antidote for a
Speaker 1: particular toxin that is found in almost every snake, but
Speaker 1: one that's very noxious and that also has an effect
Speaker 1: on your general immune UH response to the snake bite.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's the immune response that kills you, not the
Speaker 1: bite itself. This would be akin to you die from shock,
Speaker 1: not the car accident. So we have an oral and
Speaker 1: an ivy formulation. We are in clinical trials in India
Speaker 1: and the United States just finishing them up and hopefully
Speaker 1: it will be on the market. And know if you
Speaker 1: will get FDA approval and we'll be on the market.
Speaker 1: You involved with garage band. How do you get involved with,
Speaker 1: you know, a venoms anti venom situation. Well, I had
Speaker 1: met these neuroscientists and I had this lovely party in
Speaker 1: June and there are all these smart people in my
Speaker 1: my kitchen, and I said, does anyone have a great
Speaker 1: idea that they haven't done anything with here? And this
Speaker 1: person I never met, who was a friend of this
Speaker 1: neuroscientist doctor, and he goes, I do it was a
Speaker 1: totally different idea about snake bites. In fact, he even
Speaker 1: tested on himself that there was a whole thing we
Speaker 1: I had filmed at a hospital where he became paralyzed
Speaker 1: and then there was a different treatment. It was only
Speaker 1: for neurotoxic snink bites at that time, but now we
Speaker 1: came up with something better. We just did a b
Speaker 1: round where we raised a bunch of money. We've got
Speaker 1: a lot of money from the US government because the
Speaker 1: military is really interested in it. It's been a ten
Speaker 1: year path, ten your path where the general scientists in
Speaker 1: the in the snake bite community said it will never work.
Speaker 1: You guys are crazy. Do they all embrace it now?
Speaker 1: It's been remarkable. So how did you end up producing records? Well,
Speaker 1: as I said, Nona. Hendricks asked me. First, we shared
Speaker 1: a hairdresser addresser suggesting me and I had become friends
Speaker 1: with with Busta Jones, which is how I met Bernie Warrell.
Speaker 1: And he and I were like going out in New
Speaker 1: York and abusing ourselves, will say, and trying to meet
Speaker 1: meet Curls. And he had made a solo record, and
Speaker 1: I helped him with that, and then he helped me
Speaker 1: with the production of Nona. And then it was like
Speaker 1: I had been watching, you know, and I had been
Speaker 1: watching Tony bon Jovi, and I was like, I could
Speaker 1: do this. So I still started doing it a little more.
Speaker 1: And then when I got out to the studio, so
Speaker 1: the next thing I was really doing was my own
Speaker 1: solo record, which Alex Weir helped me on in the
Speaker 1: beginning quite a lot. And you know, I was teaching
Speaker 1: the engineer the things to do, and I was the producer,
Speaker 1: and so I just spent so much time in the studio.
Speaker 1: But I just became more and more comfortable, so that
Speaker 1: when I started doing the violent themes right and it's
Speaker 1: a material or the Bodine's, I had the compidence to
Speaker 1: go like, no, we're not to do it that way,
Speaker 1: we're doing it this way. And I also, you know,
Speaker 1: I have a scientific mind, so I was like I
Speaker 1: understo it, like how you patch it in the wiring.
Speaker 1: And I knew things about microphones and the patterns and
Speaker 1: the e q s and the compressors. I'm not an
Speaker 1: engineer because I never spent the time developing those skills,
Speaker 1: but I can talk through it and I understand it.
Speaker 1: And I also learned have really good engineers, So I
Speaker 1: always found really good people. And did your phone just
Speaker 1: start ringing or do you have a manager or somebody
Speaker 1: putting out the word or whatever you ran into somebody
Speaker 1: say hey, I could do your record well. After I did,
Speaker 1: uh crash the Stummies and Throwing Copper, which at the
Speaker 1: end of now the two biggest records I ever. I mean,
Speaker 1: Throwing Coppers sold more records than all the talking As
Speaker 1: records combined, right the live record. After that I wrecked,
Speaker 1: my phone wouldn't stop ringing. But I did have a manager,
Speaker 1: but there was more. She was more of a gatekeeper
Speaker 1: than it. Now what Actually, my my production career took
Speaker 1: a hit by starting garage band dot com because you know,
Speaker 1: I produced a few records for garage band that never
Speaker 1: came out actually quite wonderful, and it stopped me from
Speaker 1: You're all as good as your last hit. The good
Speaker 1: thing about being a producer is that you do three
Speaker 1: or four records a year, so you're rolling the dice
Speaker 1: four times because there's so many ways that a band
Speaker 1: or a record can fail. I mean, I've started this
Speaker 1: conversation by let's say mistakes that the record company makes.
Speaker 1: But it's mistake you know, I produced a band and sudding.
Speaker 1: They don't get along with each other. That happened, the
Speaker 1: violent fans, they broke up, they become they get into drugs,
Speaker 1: billy goat and it stops working. And so there's a
Speaker 1: lot of ways that things can fail. So rolling the
Speaker 1: dice more than once is really helpful. I had also
Speaker 1: done an analysis of who made money in the music business,
Speaker 1: and boy playing in a band was way down on
Speaker 1: the list. Top is songwriters and owning publishing, second is
Speaker 1: managers and and producers because they don't have cross collateralization
Speaker 1: with their records. You can do five dogs and do
Speaker 1: one hit record, and you can pay it on the hit.
Speaker 1: If you own a record label, you've got to admortize
Speaker 1: all of them across each other. If you're a band,
Speaker 1: you have to balance out your losses with your gains.
Speaker 1: But as a producer, as a manager and a manager
Speaker 1: gonna have multiple acts on the road at the same time,
Speaker 1: and he gets paid on growth. That's a really good gick.
Speaker 1: So I did this angle, like well, of those gigs,
Speaker 1: I can be a producer. I'm a songwriter, but I'm
Speaker 1: a slow songwriter and um and I wish I'd done
Speaker 1: that more. But I got so successful as a producer
Speaker 1: it just started to take up all my time. You know,
Speaker 1: I worked constantly, but I got to do a lot
Speaker 1: of great records. And then nineties was a fantastic time
Speaker 1: to be making records. You know, the CD sales were
Speaker 1: really good, so you could make good money at it.
Speaker 1: And I got to make a lot of records that
Speaker 1: I'm very proud of. I go back and listen to
Speaker 1: you know, I might have a fifty records I made,
Speaker 1: so it's pretty great. So you talked about looking for girls.
Speaker 1: To what degree did you partake in the rock and
Speaker 1: roll lifestyle, drugs, women, etcetera. Well, I was a lot more,
Speaker 1: a lot more cautious about it. When we were a
Speaker 1: four piece but when the big band got together, there
Speaker 1: was there were so many of us to go out.
Speaker 1: I got a little more, I got a little wilder.
Speaker 1: And what is your relationship with the other three members
Speaker 1: of Talking Heads? Now, I think I'm on good relationships
Speaker 1: with everybody. I don't think that I'm I mean, David
Speaker 1: and I are like on a relationship that like if
Speaker 1: I when I'm passing through New York, I give him
Speaker 1: a call. Um, It's much more likely that I give
Speaker 1: him a call than he gives me a call. But well,
Speaker 1: you know, we regularly have dinner, you know, wheel or
Speaker 1: lunch or something like that. You know, I went and
Speaker 1: saw American Utopia on Broadway, and I also saw it
Speaker 1: when it was a road show, when it came through
Speaker 1: San Francisco, much tighter when he was able to be
Speaker 1: in the same theater. You know, it really improved a lot. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I have a very frank relationship with David.
Speaker 1: I mean when he was decided that he was going
Speaker 1: to go out on his own and basically the band
Speaker 1: was going to end, and I said to my I said,
Speaker 1: I think David, I think you're making a mistake. I
Speaker 1: think you get all the credit for the success of
Speaker 1: the Talking Heads, so you have no pressure on your
Speaker 1: solo records as long as you get a good review.
Speaker 1: Mo Austen goes, God, my genius, just does it again,
Speaker 1: I do a solo record. They want me to do
Speaker 1: all this press that maybe in Togy Heads we would
Speaker 1: turn down and want me to be on a TV
Speaker 1: show that maybe I found embarrassing. But I'm I'm judged
Speaker 1: on the financial success of my record. You have the
Speaker 1: glorious advantage that you don't have to have that. You know,
Speaker 1: we could keep the band together for working six months
Speaker 1: every two years. It seems like a perfect world. He guys, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I gotta learn that. So that's what happened. Now
Speaker 1: he has not had anywhere near the level of commercial
Speaker 1: success with new music since the end of the talk.
Speaker 1: He gets, No, there's a lot of artist success, but
Speaker 1: I certainly know not commercial systems. Not not the commercial
Speaker 1: success that either Chris a tied To did with the
Speaker 1: Tom Time Club or certainly I did with my production career.
Speaker 1: So in the time you have left anywhere from a
Speaker 1: second to thirty years, what's that look, Well, I gotta
Speaker 1: finish this tour that's coming up. That's the first thing
Speaker 1: and I want to see, uh opheis that's the name
Speaker 1: of the snake Bite company become a uh a household name.
Speaker 1: Uh It has other possible treatments that actually could be
Speaker 1: a treatment for acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is what
Speaker 1: everybody ties from eights from or in the beginning did
Speaker 1: We did a small clinical trial about that. I had
Speaker 1: another company that I started called red Crow, that I
Speaker 1: sold to a Lira Health earlier this year. But I've
Speaker 1: at this point I'm sort of concentrating on going back
Speaker 1: to music and not getting a little further away from
Speaker 1: investing your tech. I was also on the board of
Speaker 1: directors of a very cunning edge microprocessor company called micro Unity.
Speaker 1: We were involved in a gigantic lawsuits with Intel and
Speaker 1: Dell and then all the smartphone manufacturers. We realized nearly
Speaker 1: since you wanted to talk about money, we realized nearly
Speaker 1: three quarters of a billion dollars in patent infringement. That
Speaker 1: was a ten year lawsuit. I learned an incredible amount
Speaker 1: from this legal team that I got to be on.
Speaker 1: I think my basic thing is I want to keep
Speaker 1: myself interested. I'm not I'm interested in music. I'm interested
Speaker 1: in producing. I'm interested in art. I'm also really interested
Speaker 1: in science. I was involved with the venture group called
Speaker 1: Van Earth that was about climate mitigation. We have these
Speaker 1: theories that we think that soil and something called biochar,
Speaker 1: which is based upon the terra prey to soils that
Speaker 1: the Amerindians in Brazil did pre Columbian uh was a
Speaker 1: sink for carbon and we think it's part of the
Speaker 1: solution to global warming. So we started companies and tried
Speaker 1: to develop I spent about four years on that. But
Speaker 1: you know, I'm concerned about climate change and I was
Speaker 1: trying to help save the world that way. You know
Speaker 1: what's kind of nice. It's very frustrating because everything moves
Speaker 1: so goddamn slow. I mean, what's really great about music
Speaker 1: is like at least you can make a record in
Speaker 1: a certain period of time and it comes out, and
Speaker 1: you can see what happens when you make a movie
Speaker 1: and it comes out. You know. I did these movies
Speaker 1: Take Me to the River I did. Uh. There's another
Speaker 1: one called Take Me to the River Nola that I
Speaker 1: had a little bit to do with. I did a
Speaker 1: movie with Kenny Wayne Shephard called Ten Days Out Blues
Speaker 1: from the back roads, which was my idea for a
Speaker 1: double trouble and Kenny Wayne. We traveled around playing with
Speaker 1: unknown blues musicians and also like BB King in Indianola, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: which is where he's from, at a juke joint out
Speaker 1: in the middle of the woods. What I want to
Speaker 1: do is just keep myself doing interesting things and things
Speaker 1: that that that my mind is challenged to do, and
Speaker 1: so doing the same thing forever it starts to get boring.
Speaker 1: That was a thing that music. As much as I
Speaker 1: love it, I think music has gone from being the
Speaker 1: centerpiece of philosophical engagement for our world, which it was
Speaker 1: in the late sixties and early seventies, to be the
Speaker 1: backgrounds of everybody's life. And you know that people talk
Speaker 1: about their playlists and sometimes a lot of their collection
Speaker 1: of how many songs they have, two thirds of which
Speaker 1: they've never listened to. It's it's it's become commodified. Obviously
Speaker 1: with streaming at least it's getting better now, But quality
Speaker 1: got worse it didn't, You know. We were always trying
Speaker 1: to make things sound better. I would work with Warner
Speaker 1: Brothers about their the formulations on their cassettes to make
Speaker 1: the cassette sound better. And I go down to the
Speaker 1: basement Warner Brothers and sit and listened to like eight
Speaker 1: different formulas and to try and choose which one we
Speaker 1: would put our cassettes out on you Again, this was
Speaker 1: something might go down on the basement. The Warm brothers
Speaker 1: and artists never come down here. What are you doing
Speaker 1: down here? But it's like I enjoyed the technology. I
Speaker 1: enjoyed the whole process of what it takes to go
Speaker 1: all the way from singing the song to it being pressed,
Speaker 1: to it being a duplication plant, and all the places
Speaker 1: that could go wrong, and I wanted to know about
Speaker 1: it and want to know how to fix it if
Speaker 1: I had to. Well, you know, it's just really funny
Speaker 1: talking to you, because generally speaking, music is a dumb business,
Speaker 1: and you're anything but dumb. Not that there aren't smart
Speaker 1: people in it, but a lot of these conversations I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've had them, are very frustrating. So it's been
Speaker 1: very stimulating talking to you. Oh, I've enjoyed it very much,
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. It was great a lot to
Speaker 1: do it again until next time. This is Bob left
Speaker 1: set